If Only
by HolidayBoredom
Summary: What if Artemis had never lied to Holly in The Time Paradox? What if he was the one to kiss her, and not the other way around? AF:TTP re-write. Rated T for language and innuendo. Chapter Five: After falling into a giant barbecue Artemis is in a race against time. Problem is, Holly's got a serious head start. And she has no idea how the game has changed.
1. Splitting Time

**Just re-read Rocket Axxonu's _The Other Paradox _and I've been thinking about doing my own re-write for a while... All credit for 99.98% of the plot and characters goes to the masterful Eoin Colfer. (And the first two lines in italics - and any subsequent quotes from _The Time Paradox_)**

* * *

><p>Artemis watched Holly stride towards the main doors.<p>

_If only, _he thought. _If only._

_Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox _— Eoin Colfer

* * *

><p><span>Chapter One – Splitting Time<span>

_Holly spoke kindly; she felt sorry for Artemis. Angeline's illness reminded her painfully of her own mother's final days._

_'We cannot interfere, Artemis. Humans must be allowed to live their lives.'_

'Then do not interfere,' snapped Artemis, turning to look at her with eyes which were cold and deceptively calm. 'Your laws govern neither humans nor demons. If No.1 decides to help me then it is completely outside of your jurisdiction to stop him.'

Holly looked exasperatedly at Foaly.

'_Technically_ he's right,' said the centaur. He was staring down at both human and elf from the monitor of Artemis's parent's fifty-inch television, his tin hat perched on his head at what could be described as a rakish angle. 'Except, you know, the whole _the repercussions of taking a casual skip into the time stream could be majorly catastrophic for the entire planet _thing_._'

Artemis snorted. 'Oh please. Don't be so dramatic. At any rate— if this trip is successful, the results would not purely save Mother. It is highly unlikely that her case is unique. Who knows how many others could be falling victim to spelltrophy as we speak? You could have an epidemic on your hands. Perhaps even a pandemic. The days of spelltrophy were Hellish. Would you want to make a return to them? '

Their silence was answer enough.

Angeline made a faint rasping noise from the bed, her shoulders rising, by mere millimetres, from her rumpled bed sheets. Her son was immediately by her side. Holly used the distraction to flick her helmet visor down and hold a private conference with Foaly.

'You said he was right,' she said, turning her back on the bed, 'that _technically _we can't interfere.'

'Well not _technically _no!' The centaur's fingers were bunched in his hair, his tin hat crumpling. '_Technically _we couldn't stop him from starting a human World War Three but I think we'd be inclined to! However much he tries to shrug off the consequences of dipping into the time stream it really is a _deathly_ serious issue. We can't… we can't just jump into the time stream for our every problem!'

Holly brow creased. 'But this isn't _every _problem, Foaly. You know how fast spelltrophy can spread and what damage it can do. Wouldn't… wouldn't it be best to take action now and stop this before it escalates?'

Foaly's expression dropped. 'You're thinking of going with him, aren't you.'

It wasn't a question.

Holly's eyes unfocused from her helmet screen. '_No. _I'm just saying that… if he wants to do this, then…'

'You're going to go with him.'

'_No._'

'And you're going to go through another IA investigation, almost lose your badge and _I'm going to have to float you rent money again_.'

Holly called up No.1's icon on her helmet's contact list. 'I'm going to call No.1. This is a pointless argument until he gets here anyway.'

Behind her, Artemis was holding onto his mother's claw-like hand like a drowning man clinging to a life raft.

'Hold on, mother,' he murmured, watching her strain for breath. 'I'll only be a moment.'

* * *

><p>Holly was staring at an incredibly intriguing vase. It had to be incredibly intriguing because she'd been staring at it for the last minute, her cheeks tight and her forehead burning.<p>

'How long will I have?' asked Artemis, who had been staring hard at No.1's face for the last minute – ever since he had returned from placing his shirt, tie, trousers, sock suspenders, socks and loafers inside his wardrobe.

The little demon pondered briefly over this question. 'Three hours. No, three days. After that my magic will start wearing thin and it'll be difficult to call you back to me.'

'Can I use your magic to heal myself, if needs must?'

Holly's gaze shifted briefly from the vase.

'Only a few stitches worth, nothing more than that. Just try to stay out of trouble, Arty.'

Foaly gave a brief, humourless laugh. 'Like _that's_ going to happen.'

'I should only be in the house for a few minutes,' said Artemis, reaching to adjust cufflinks which were no longer there. 'I distinctly remember carrying the lemur cage down the stairs and past the study. All I need to do is snatch it.'

'Because physical movement is _so_ your forte.'

'Gentlemen!' squeaked No.1 before things could escalate. Artemis, Holly and Foaly all stared at him. 'What?' continued the demon defensively. 'It's my voice of power, all right? The spell is ready. Are you ready, Artemis?'

The teenager took a deep breath and rolled his skinny shoulders.

Holly fidgeted.

_You can't go with him. It's against every law you work to keep. And anyway, all he has to do is snatch a monkey… Simple. _

Holly's leg jiggled frantically.

'But seriously, don't die, Mud Boy,' said Foaly, his expression sobering. 'Butler will skin us all alive if we ever have to explain to him why we lost you eight years ago.'

Artemis thought of where his mother lay dying, oblivious to the drastic action her son was about to take. His throat felt suddenly tight.

'Holly,' he blurted.

The elf was jerked from her thoughts. She looked up and met his mismatched eyes for the first time in over twenty minutes.

Artemis swallowed. 'If I don't make it back—'

'You _are _going to make it back.'

'_If _I don't make it back... You said you could make her comfortable. You'll still do that for me, won't you? You'll see that my mother does not suffer.'

Holly clenched her fists. A memory flashed in her head of a hospital cot, the stench of disinfectant and a red-headed woman smiling bravely through a haze of agony.

'Yes,' she replied, her own throat suddenly the width of a straw. 'I'll do it.'

Artemis simply nodded.

'Wagons roll!' squeaked No.1.

The teenager closed his eyes, his brow wrinkled in concentration. There was a brief flash of purple light, a roar like a thousand elephants trapped in a telephone box, and then the spot where Artemis had been standing was suddenly vacated. Almost vacated.

'What is _that_?' demanded Foaly, pointing at the newly-erected smoke statue of Artemis Fowl.

'A ghost image,' explained No.1. 'Is it a bit creepy. Makes it seem like he's dead...'

Holly released a roar of frustration. 'All right!' she snapped, making both Foaly and No.1 jump. 'Okay! Yes. Here I go again.' She ripped down the zip of her shimmer suit.

'You _cannot_ be serious,' whinnied Foaly, his eyes almost breaching their sockets as she yanked off her boots. 'He's already _gone_!'

'Then I'll follow him!'

Foaly looked to No.1. 'Please tell her this is madness.'

'Nope!' said the demon in a jolly voice, almost as if he wasn't surprised at all at this new change to the plan. 'She's got approximately four seconds before any temporal interruption would cause a breach in Artemis's reality. You ready, Holly?'

Holly was dancing on one leg, struggling to pull off her long combat socks.

'Follow my magic,' said No.1, his eyes blazing with power. 'When you feel my magic, you'll feel him. '

Holly looked up. 'Wait, what—?'

And the elephants roared.

* * *

><p>Artemis was crying silently into the carpet. Memories of the time stream whirled around his brain – the screams of burning animals, the screech of his mother as she threw a tea tray towards the son she no longer knew – fading slowly, too slowly.<p>

_It is all in the past, _he told himself. _Get a hold of yourself. You have a mission._

Traversing the time stream alone had been nothing like his journeys to and from Hybras. Then, he had been accompanied by a thousand other souls. Holly had been there to help him, to hold his hand (in spirit) and guide him through. Their minds had been one.

He struggled to his feet, trying to shake off the grief and upset.

He was on his own this time. For the first time in his life, completely alone.

_I thought she would come. _

He dismissed the thought almost angrily. If he had wanted her to come then he could have forced her to. He had thought about it, briefly, had contrived a plan which involved blaming Holly for his mother's spelltrophy. She would have come then, out of guilt.

_I truly thought she would come of her own accord. I thought…_

Artemis staggered towards a mirrored closet.

If Holly wasn't there, then fine. He could very much have used her skills – when Foaly had said physical movement wasn't his forte he was aware that had been a tremendous understatement – but this truly was a simple enough task: wait behind door, snatch lemur, return to the future.

'As easy as one, two, three,' muttered Artemis.

'As simple as do, re, mi?'

The teenager almost jumped out of his skin. He caught sight of the giant Eurasian, who had just emerged from the door concealed behind the study bookcase, and backed straight into the wardrobe's doors.

'Butler.'

'Having a few sartorial issues, are we?'

'Butler, you must listen to me.'

'Nope. Don't think I do.'

And the bodyguard's mammoth arm began the arc that would bring up his pistol and, inevitably, fire a hypodermic dart deep into Artemis's neck.

_You need to avoid this, _the teenager's brain reminded his as he watched the gun rise. _Butler or Holly is not about to grab you by the collar and save you. Butler is about to shoot you and drug you. _

'He shouldn't even be here!' hissed Artemis at the same time as throwing himself away from the wardrobe doors. The dart hit glass and teenager exited the room as quickly as his bare legs would carry him.

'I hate Thursdays,' grumbled Butler, and stalked after him.

There was a piercing shriek from above and the sound of thin metal hitting plaster. Butler's head turned towards the noise. The half-naked intruder hurtled away from him down the stairs just as Master Artemis appeared gasping over the balcony at the summit.

'Butler!' cried the ten-year-old, as shaken and unkempt as Butler had ever seen him. 'Come quickly! Mother, she… she does not recognise me. I brought her tea but… she threw the whole… She is attempting to call the police!'

Out of the tail of his eye, the bodyguard saw a brief flash of crimson briefs and knew the intruder had vanished.

'Of course, Master Artemis. I won't be a moment.'

'No! Not in a _moment_! _Now!' _

The ten-year-old gave him a strained, half-mad glare and vanished.

Butler took the stairs four at a time, skidding slightly on the polished parquet of the entrance floor. When he entered the kitchens, the intruder was waiting for him, backed up against a heavy wooden-topped counter.

'Wait,' ordered the boy, young man maybe, in bizarrely familiar tones.

Butler had a brief flashback to a night long ago, stood in the pouring rain, a younger Artemis Senior sheltering beneath a black umbrella instructing Butler's uncle to only shoot on his signal.

'You need to listen to me,' continued the young man, his gaze half-obstructed by a curtain of dark, limply curling hair. 'Where is the lemur?'

Butler's brow contracted. 'Lemur?'

'The Silky Sifaka. You must have it in the house. Where is it?'

There was another high scream from the floor above. The young man's expression didn't flicker.

'Look,' said Butler flatly. 'I don't know what mental hospital you escaped from but it still doesn't give you an excuse to break into private property in nothing but your pants.'

Artemis pushed aside his new locks, exposing a long and now slightly bristled face. 'Surely you must recognise me,' he said. 'I cannot look _that _different.'

Butler looked unimpressed. 'What's your name? Can you remember anything about where you've come from?'

The man released his hair, allowing it to swing straight back into his features. 'Somewhere quite local, Domovoi, I assure you.'

And Butler's gun was up, the safety off.

'Who are you?' demanded the Eurasian, and this time there was no patience, no muted exasperation. Only three people on Earth knew that name. Two of whom could fight off an army. The third— 'What have you done to Juliet?'

'Nothing,' promised the young man firmly, and Butler noticed for the first time that his eyes did not match. 'You told me that name yourself. In three years' time.'

'_Butler!' _

The young master's shout acted like an electric shock to Butler's brain. He considered his options within the second and acted.

The young man's eyes widened. And then his face was contracting with pain and long-fingered hands were flying up to the dart protruding from his right shoulder. Butler strode briskly across the kitchen.

'Later,' grunted Butler, stopping the young man's head from hitting the counter top just before it did, 'we are going to have a very long and serious talk about this.'

Artemis blinked slovenly as he was hoisted up. 'But… but…'

'No. No buts.'

Artemis gripped weakly at the bodyguard's lapel and Butler caught sight of a very familiar left eye… The elder man frowned and the teenager finally slumped against him, unconsciousness.

* * *

><p>Holly staggered shakily towards the wardrobe. Her tears were already drying on her face, the sound of her mother's tired last breaths fading from her immediate thoughts. She pressed her palms to the door's misty mirrors, hung her head and breathed.<p>

_Artemis should be near. He can't have got too far yet. _

She groaned and slid to the floor.

_A bit longer. Give me a minute and I'll move. Just a minute. _

'Artemis…?' she whispered hopefully. 'Artemis?'

Nothing. The room was silent. The house was silent. She rocked her head back against the wardrobe doors. If she had truly believed Artemis would have stayed in this room, snatched the lemur from his younger self's grasp, and sunk immediately back into the time stream, then she wouldn't have come. She placed a hand over her heart and jammed her eyes shut.

_Feel for him…_

A strange heat flooded her left side. She felt a second, steady heartbeat, a sharp pain in her shoulder and her mind flooded with ghostly images about… stock investments?

Her eyes rolled. So he was alive and thinking about stock investments. Not in too much trouble then. She got to her feet and, for the first time, registered her reflection in the mirror.

'Oh, d'arvit,' she breathed.

She was a _child. _She couldn't be more than forty years old again, fifty at the most: a fresh-faced recruit just starting to rise through the ranks of the academy; still living at home with… She flinched as if physically struck.

_It's all this thinking about mums. It's taken me back to how it was. How I was. _

She gritted her teeth. It was in the past. Mum's life was lost long ago. It was Angeline Fowl's she should concentrate on now — hers and all the others who might soon fall victim to spelltrophy.

She flung open the wardrobe doors and began to rummage for something which would fit.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

* * *

><p>'Sell the phonetix shares!' blurted Artemis.<p>

He blinked once. Twice. His hands reached out blindly and he felt short-haired matting, a metal roof, a plastic bulb of some sort… He clicked it on.

So he had woken up in the boot of a car. A very spacious boot complete with air-conditioning and titanium reinforcement.

_The Bentley. _

'Well that really could not have gone worse,' he muttered, rolling over and squinting at the boot's clunky lock before deciding it definitely wasn't worth his effort.

Butler's younger face drifted to the forefront of his mind; his impatience as he had come across the naked intruder in his master's study; his anger as that same intruder had uttered his name. That forbidden first name…

_Your memories are completely unreliable. You have no idea what could happen next. _

He closed his eyes tightly and waited for an idea to spark. After two minute's solid thinking nothing had yet to occur to him. He jerked onto his back, inadvertently elbowing the curved metal of the wheel arch. He swore loudly, and continued to swear, until the boot lid swung suddenly upwards and he was greeted by a broadly grinning, immensely hairy face.

'Hey thar,' said the face. 'You ordered a timely rescue for this address?'

'Mulch,' he gasped.

The dwarf's grin grew.

Artemis clambered out of the boot, goosebumps erupting on his skin as he emerged into the cool night air. Mulch threw a small package in his direction.

'The note said to bring you some clothes,' said the dwarf, bringing out something tough and brown from a deep pocket and beginning to chew on it. 'Though I was expecting someone a little less lanky, what with Mud Men not supposed to be knowing about the People and being able to send them notes an' all…'

Artemis ripped open the bag. The gravel of the car park surface was cutting into the soft soles of his feet and, while most of his mind was marvelling at the solution to this latest mystery occurrence, he was still praying that a pair of shoes would be included in the bundle.

'But you don't care that I'm human,' observed Artemis, pulling out a striped shirt and yanking it over his head. 'You are still here.'

The dwarf shrugged. 'I'm less inclined to care with that incentive you gave me.'

'Which was?'

Mulch pulled the jerky from his mouth and jabbed a muddy finger in the direction of Artemis's chest. 'Hey now. Don't you back out on me, Mud Man. You promised me a reward if I sprung you. I've held up my part of this deal.'

Artemis unrolled a pair of dirt-packed dungarees and stepped swiftly into one leg. The cuff rose halfway up his shin. 'It seems to me that you are already at a disadvantage then, master dwarf.'

A pair of unhuman hands gripped about his ankles and Artemis was sent flying, bodily, back towards the boot. His head smacked hard against the rear wall, the lid slammed down on top of him and he was plunged back into darkness.

'Mulch!' he wheezed through the door, the air thrown from his lungs. 'Mulch Diggums do not leave me.'

'You're a Mud Man, Mud Man,' was the muffled reply. 'Why should I do anything you say?'

'Because you already have, Mulch. I found you, when you least expected it, and delivered your person directly to me. What's to say I couldn't do it again? What's to say that the next time you open a locked door there won't be something far nastier waiting on the other side?' Artemis waited a moment for this to sink in. 'I brought you here for a reason, Mulch.'

_Even if I'm not quite sure what that reason is, _thought the teenager, but didn't say that part out loud.

Mulch's voice drew nearer and Artemis knew he was speaking directly to the lock. 'And what's to say I don't like your reason, Mud Man? And as for popping up from behind locked doors, you won't be able to do any of that if I just kill you now.'

Artemis shifted his weight so he was facing Mulch. 'You are not a murderer, Mister Diggums. You are a thief. I am in need of your skills. Just one job and then you shall most assuredly get your reward.'

There was a pause.

'And why should I trust you?'

'You shouldn't.'

Another pause.

'I need help in stealing something. An animal.'

'From who?'

'From myself.'

The boot lid cranked open once more and Artemis squinted in the moonlight.

'Get your trousers on, Mud Man,' grunted the dwarf, his top lip twitching with dislike. 'My dwarf hairs are starting to tingle.'

* * *

><p>As Butler followed his charge along the staff corridor of Rathdown Park's primate enclosure his thoughts drifted to the man in the red boxers.<p>

'_Surely you must recognise me?_' he had said. '_I cannot look that different._'

Master Artemis had examined the unconscious intruder inside the Bentley's cavernous boot.

'_And he was undressed when you discovered him?' _

'_Yes.'_

'_But you couldn't find a stitch of his clothing?' _

'_No.'_

'_Curious.' _The little Artemis had straightened and adjusted his suit jacket. '_I believe your escaped mental patient theory may have some merit. But in that case, you expect him to have some sort of hospital wristband to identify him…'_

Butler had phoned Juliet's Californian school the instant he had dumped the intruder's body in the pantry. The school's receptionist had connected him and, after Juliet had satisfied his frantic inquiries as to her safety and location, his little sister had jabbered on to him about some boy band called "N'Sink" and he'd hung up without another word.

So it wasn't Juliet who had told the intruder his name.

'_You told me,' _the man had said,_ 'in three years' time.' _

And he had also asked about the lemur; the lemur Master Artemis had announced they would be stealing around half an hour _after_ the intruder had been sedated. But Butler had not passed on that information either. For some reason, he had kept the entire kitchen conversation to himself.

_I'll interrogate that stranger later, once this task is done. _

'What a beast,' said Master Artemis, forcing Butler to concentrate on the mission to hand. '_Gorilla beringei beringei_. First scientifically described by Doctor Thomas S. Savage in 1847.'

Butler followed his principal's line of vision, his eyebrows rising slightly as he caught sight of the gargantuan gorilla slumbering in its nest. 'Tell me we're not taking that with us as well.'

The 10-year-old chuckled. 'Another time perhaps...'

The gorilla grunted in its sleep.

* * *

><p>The teenaged Artemis winced as the sound of churning, slopping and grinding muck tunnelled through his earpiece into his ear. Mulch should be over halfway to the enclosure, he deduced, his left hand gripping the stalk of some spare foliage he was hiding behind. He could just see Butler's shadow passing by the gorilla enclosure. His little self would be walking in front, probably delivering a lecture on primates…<p>

Artemis jumped as his left hand touched something mysteriously wet. He was in an undignified position, crouched down with mud and God-only-knew-what-else soaking into his knees. But it smelt as if Mulch had pulled his dungarees from some form of compost heap prior to giving them to Artemis so it wasn't as if he could get them any dirtier.

_Better than no trousers at all._

He looked back towards the lemur enclosure.

'Come on, Mulch,' he muttered. 'Let's get this over with.'

The cacophony of mud and digging cut off and Artemis heard the squelching snap of Mulch's jaw re-hinging.

'Keep your hair on Mud Man, I'm here.'

'And you are sure?'

Short as it was, Mulch's response still taught Artemis several new Gnommish words.

* * *

><p>Butler pushed open the electronically-released door and little Artemis swept past him, nutrient sack at the ready.<p>

'This should tempt it down,' said the boy over his shoulder. 'If not, you can shoot it. Try to avoid the skull.'

The bodyguard frowned. 'Shoot it?'

'I am not in the habit of repeating myself, Butler.'

The Silky Sifaka was clinging to a branch set high above the adjoining gorilla enclosure, its brown eyes wide and aware, surveying the two newcomers with open curiosity.

Artemis raised the nutrient bag towards it. 'Come here, creature,' he said, almost kindly. 'Come and have the nice treat.'

_Yes, _thought Butler, _please do. Then we can finish this and I can get to the bottom of that mystery visitor._

Then the earth next door exploded.

* * *

><p>Artemis watched Mulch rocket out the ground and ricochet off the roof of the gorilla cage with abject horror. His mouth gaped for a moment, his brain registering what had happened and why but still not ready to believe it.<p>

And then something stirred in the trees across from where Mulch lay bleeding and unconscious.

_Butler and Holly aren't here, _his brain reminded him, yet again._ You will need to use all of your brains, skill and cunning if you are to rescue this situation without incurring fatal injuries. _

And with that, Artemis got to his feet, repeated one of his newly learnt Gnommish phrases, and sprinted towards the cage.

* * *

><p>Butler had grabbed 10-year-old Artemis's collar the instant that <em>thing <em>had erupted from the floor of the gorilla cage. He was on the floor now, cupping the boy protectively beneath him. Through heavy breaths, he listened hard. There had been no more explosions, no aftershock… The bodyguard uncurled his head, keeping his arms firmly around the ten-year-old who was grumbling something about having dirtied his knees. Something was chirruping above them. Butler looked up to see the lemur jumping up and down in glee, using its long tail to swing and jerk from surrounding branches.

'What was that?' demanded Artemis tetchily from beneath him.

Butler got to his feet, his gun gripped in his right hand, his left pointing at the earth; a silent 'stay down'. His 10-year-old principal was apparently not familiar with the gesture.

'What _is_ that_?_' asked the boy, already standing, curling his lip at the bloodied, muddied figure lying motionless on the floor of the next cage. 'What—'

Then a 200 pound mountain gorilla came roaring out of the bushes, effectively cutting Artemis's sentence short.

Another voice, higher, human, bellowed across the enclosure. '_Oi!' _it screamed. '_You!'_

* * *

><p>Internally, Artemis slapped a palm to his forehead.<p>

Externally, Artemis shouted again, waving his arms frantically above his head. He was over the moat now and inside the enclosure, mere metres from the dark-haired beast now advancing on Mulch.

Facts were flashing through his mind – top speeds, bite radiuses, arm strengths, weights: nothing that could really help him at that moment. His plan hinged completely on external reactions.

He dipped low and picked up a stone from the floor, hurling it at the gorilla's back. It missed by a number of feet but clanged off a metal feeding unit, still causing the animal to roar and turn its attention to the dishevelled figure behind it.

_Come on, _thought Artemis, glancing briefly past Mulch to the lemur cage. _Please._

Then the teenager met the gorilla's black, depthless gaze.

* * *

><p>Butler watched as the lanky-limbed man from earlier, who had apparently managed to find a pair of battered lederhosen to dress in as well as an escape route from the boot, charged into the gorilla cage bellowing at the top of his voice.<p>

Lemur forgotten (for the moment), Artemis stood by his side, eyes narrowed incredulously. 'This is lunacy,' he breathed. 'What does he think he's doing?'

The intruder shouted again, grabbing a rock from the ground and throwing it at the gorilla. It missed by miles.

'His aim's as poor as yours,' said Butler weakly, still not really believing what he was seeing.

The 10-year-old shot him a look.

Next door, the gorilla was advancing on the intruder now, leaving behind the scruffy midget groaning into the dirt. It was stamping its fists and snorting viciously, preparing to charge as the stranger stumbled hurriedly backwards over the uneven ground.

'Oh dear,' said Artemis, as the intruder's expression switched from determined to slightly worried. 'As a punishment for breaking and entering I feel this might be a tad harsh…'

Butler took a step forward, his gun half raised.

_If he dies—_

The man tripped over a stone and landed hard on his rear. He gasped as the monster reared up in front of him.

'_Somewhere quite local, Domovoi, I assure you.'_

Butler glanced down at the young boy beside him. His principle's nose was wrinkled in preparation of what was bound to be a bloody and gruesome display.

'_You told me yourself, in three years' time.'_

Butler knelt, poked the muzzle of his rifle through the cage's mesh, and fired.

* * *

><p>The dart hit the gorilla high in the shoulder.<p>

Artemis's body flooded with relief. He gaze shot to the lemur cage next door, to the gigantic man with a rifle sight still raised to his eye. Then the gorilla reared, head swivelling towards the pain in its back, and Artemis had to snap his knees up to his chest to avoid being trampled.

_You are not safe yet, _warned his brain, and he twisted desperately onto his front.

He grabbed at the earth, trying to scramble away to safety on ill-coordinated hands and knees. The gorilla lumbered behind him, still howling.

_Move. Move! _

His blood was pounding it his ears. He was cursing himself for having placed himself in this position.

_If you die here, Mother dies with you._

Artemis made the mistake of looking back and his mismatched eyes widened only to clench shut again as one the gorilla's clumsily flailing fists swung towards him. The blow was not at full force, but it was still enough to slam him sideways, sending him rolling and skidding into the brush – out of sight.

* * *

><p>The gorilla was staggering, swaying like a drunken Dubliner on a heavy Saturday night. Its eyes rolled up in its dark head and, finally, it collapsed splay-limbed on the ground within a metre of the <em>thing <em>which had kicked off all the commotion in the first place.

The silence that followed was thick and tense. Ten-year-old Artemis was staring at the gorilla, his expression closed.

'Why,' he asked eventually. 'Why did you do that?'

Butler was about to answer when the scream of a police siren rudely interrupted him.

_Oh God_, thought Butler. _Just what I need._

'Time to leave,' he said aloud.

'Not without the lemur,' insisted Artemis, speaking over the wailing that was growing steadily closer, and Butler knew that look and what it meant.

The bodyguard twisted and, with only a slight hesitation, shot a second dart into the lemur. The little creature's chittering cut off as it fell like a stone and landed, miraculously, in the little boy's outstretched arms.

'Now can we leave?' asked Butler politely.

* * *

><p>Back at Fowl Manor, Holly had found an outfit relatively easily. She had unhooked what was presumably one of Artemis's first ever suits from the wardrobe rail and pulled it on. His little loafers fit her well enough, and after knocking down a box from atop the wardrobe, she had a found a neat woolly hat to pull over her ears – throwing aside a silver wig to get to it.<p>

The doorbell had kept ringing as she had dressed. After making sure the hat was properly covering her ear tips, she had trotted down the main staircase and listened to the Mud Man voices outside the entrance.

'Hello?' a voice was calling in a heavy Dublin accent. 'Anyone home?'

'I say we break the door down,' said a second voice, lower, moodier.

'Have yah _seen _this door?'

Holly stood on tiptoes to reach the chain and dragged the door back.

Two men wearing matching dark hats and florescent jackets stared down at her. The one on the left, his cheeks pockmarked with old acne scars, smiled.

'Hello there, molly,' he said cheerily. 'We're from the garda. We had a call earlier about a disturbance…'

'_Do you have transportation?_' asked Holly, her voice hypnotic, her eyes wide and enchanting.

* * *

><p>Artemis came to slowly. He felt battered, abused, like the day after the day after one of Butler's kettlebell workouts. His head was throbbing. His left side felt as if someone had taken a hammer to his ribs and played them like a xylophone.<p>

'Artemis?' said a soft voice from above him. 'Artemis, can you hear me?'

His own voice was hoarse and croaky. 'Mother…?'

'Not quite.'

He opened one eye.

Holly Short was smiling grimly down at him. 'Hello, stranger.'

'Holly,' he gasped, jerking upright despite his body's protests. 'No. I can't be back in the present! I haven't got the lemur! I need the lemur!'

She pressed her hands to his shoulders. 'Calm, Artemis. You're not home yet.'

'Then why are you here? How–?'

'I followed you. Come on genius, keep up.'

She smiled at him again but he didn't smile back.

'You,' – he faltered – 'There's something different.'

'Looks like the time stream has messed with both our faces.'

Artemis just stared at her. 'You came,' he said. 'You came after me.'

The blood was thundering in his ears, his heart was threatening to leap out of his chest.

She laughed. 'Of course I did. You couldn't do without me.'

And, flushed with incredible relief, still not quite with it after his trial-by-gorilla, glad to be alive, not believing that this wasn't some dream brought on by a concussion, his head pushed forward and he pressed his lips to Holly Short's.

* * *

><p>Butler forced himself to drive carefully. Artemis was on the back seat, still clutching the nutrient bag, the lemur trapped in a small cage beside him.<p>

'I suppose that man will have been arrested,' said the 10-year-old, gazing out the window as they whipped along the fast lane of the M1. 'Providing he isn't dead, of course. The gorilla did manage a last blow.'

The bodyguard's fingers were gripping tightly to the steering wheel.

'Strange thing, though,' continued Artemis. 'I have just checked the boot's rear camera and that other man, the one who came out of the ground, seems to have been his accomplice.'

Butler glanced briefly back in the rear-view mirror and met his principal's cool gaze.

'They also took a few things from the glove compartment— nothing overly valuable. However, the security panel says that it was _I _who released the secret drawer.'

Butler indicated left, moving across to come off at the next junction. 'Strange,' he admitted.

'Hmm.'

They were quiet for the rest of the way to the airport.

* * *

><p>Holly's thought process had become just one long exclamation mark.<p>

'Er…Thank you…?' she said after a moment, her mind still largely incapable of coherent thought.

The teenager looked away, struggling to sit up properly. He wrapped an arm around his ribcage. 'Mulch was here,' he grunted, levering himself onto one elbow. 'He helped me but was injured in the process. Where–?'

Holly jerked her head towards the enclosure exit. 'In the car,' she said, glad to have something solid to focus on. 'I had to tackle him once he caught sight of me. He tried to escape, ranting about never trusting dirty Mud Men again… What's happened, Artemis?'

The teenager didn't answer. His brain was spinning. He felt, appropriately, like he'd just been smacked over the head by a gorilla.

_She's come, _he thought. _She has come._

'You say you've got a car?' he said eventually, gathering his wits about him. 'I'll explain once we're in it.'

* * *

><p><strong>Let's be honest, the conversation in the next chapter is going to be so much fun the other way around. <strong>

**Review?**


	2. Arse Over Elbow

**Thank you for all the lovely reviews! **

**Seems like people liked the first chapter! I'm glad, because this is so much fun to write. And I'm taking it into somewhat alien territory by the end so we'll see how you feel about it...  
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**This has a few swearwords in it. So just close your eyes for those bits if you're not comfortable.  
><strong>

* * *

><p><span>Chapter Two – Arse over elbow<br>

Getting into the back of a police car was obviously a highly counterintuitive move for Artemis. He had stood there, glowering at the open door, until Holly had eventually shoved him in, sliding him along the seat until he was sat thigh-to-thigh with an inventively restrained Mulch.

'Glad to see you're alive,' the teenager had said, smiling sincerely as Holly had slammed the door behind them.

Mulch managed to choke something explicit around his DIY mouth chain.

Artemis had frowned. 'Surely we can take that off. Mr Diggums is in my employ. I doubt he would bite either of us if he still wants his reward.'

Holly just gave him a look. 'You still need to explain to me how he's even here.'

'His presence is far less a mystery than yours.'

She leant forward, pushing up against Artemis's knees until her eyes were level with the rear view mirror.

'_Drive west,_' she ordered the policeman gazing back at her. '_Keep on the back roads._'

His slumbering colleague issued a loud snore from the passenger seat and the car began to move.

'Seriously,' said Holly sitting back. 'How is he with you?'

'I sent him a note,' replied Artemis. 'Well, I will. Just as soon as we are back.'

Holly resisted the urge to bang her head against the window. 'And the unconscious gorilla?'

'A slight blip.'

'Running out of patience here, Artemis.'

The genius scowled. 'Well, obviously things have not gone to plan,' he snapped, cockiness vanishing. 'I stepped out of the time stream and within minutes Butler had discovered me and attempted to sedate me. I ran. Mother was upstairs with my younger self, having… an episode. I decided I would need to ask questions, recruit Butler if I could–'

Holly's blood ran cold. '_Artemis._'

'What choice did I have? The man had seen me! I assumed he would instantly recognise me. I hadn't, of course, yet caught sight of my appearance…'

Holly glared at him, at the long hair, the sparse beard. The young man continued.

'It did not work. I attempted to reveal myself — not directly! I… I called him by his name. His first name. His reaction was not favourable and I woke up in the boot of the Bentley. Mr Diggums here released me, we attempted to retrieve the lemur before they could reach it, but things once more went awry. Then I wake up for the second time with you hovering over me…'

Holly closed her eyes and let her head rock back against the seat. 'So they have the lemur.'

'They'll be well on their way to Morocco by now. Our next opportunity to grab it will be at the exchange with Damon Kronski. That, at least, is clear in my mind.'

Holly looked at him. 'You said it was clear that the lemur was in your house.'

'And I was wrong!'

The teenager's voice was loud inside the small space.

'I'm not saying it to _get _at you, Artemis,' said the elf stiffly. 'I'm saying it because, reading between the lines, you were almost mauled by a gorilla. Things aren't in your control.'

'It doesn't matter. The lemur—'

'It _does_ matter.'

He glared at her, and suddenly Holly was acutely aware of just how little room there was between them.

'Why are you here, Holly?' he asked, in tones colder than Holly had heard from him in years. 'I thought you had decided to stay behind?'

They glared at each other a moment. Holly noticed that his eyes were still mismatched like hers.

She snorted and looked away from him. Artemis turned as well, unwillingly catching Mulch's eye. The dwarf was watching him quietly, one bushy eyebrow raised. The teenager reached across and snapped open Holly's makeshift mouth guard.

'Ergh,' said Mulch, spitting the remains of the broken handcuffs onto the floor. 'Are you two quite finished?' Neither Holly nor Artemis responded. 'Because you,' snapped the dwarf, jabbing an elbow in Holly's direction and accidentally-on-purpose knocking Artemis in his beaten ribs, 'are late to this party. You can't be swooping in now, giving it out to the Mud Boy, when you were conspicuously absent before everything went tits up. And anyway, me and Dopey here had the whole thing under control until them Mud Man zoo designers messed everything up.

'And _you_.' Mulch elbowed Artemis properly in the side, causing the teenager to hiss through gritted teeth, 'better get your _d'arvit_ back together if you want me to stick with this deal of ours. I said I'd help you steal a lemur. But the pig's right—'

'_Pig?_' exclaimed Holly.

'—right now, you don't know your flan-tube from your cratchet and you're looking seriously—' Mulch repeated one of his choice Gnommish words from earlier. 'There,' he finished. 'I've said my piece.'

The car was silent for a moment.

Artemis, still doubled over from the force of Mulch's elbow, felt Holly's body start to shake beside him. He sat up quickly, horrified by the idea that she might be crying… but she wasn't.

His face fell. 'I fail to see the joke.'

Holly just shook her head, grinning into her hands.

'We're here because my mother is _dying_.'

At that, she got a hold of herself and looked at him. 'I know,' she replied. 'And we'll cure her. We've got half the gang here, Artemis. How can we fail?' She eyed him a moment. 'What are you wearing?'

'It's a speciality piece from the House of Sludge,' explained Mulch. 'Special bum flap capabilities.'

Artemis raised a slim hand. 'I don't want to know,' he said. 'And is that _my_ suit you're wearing?'

'Well, it's from your wardrobe.' Holly looked down at herself, at her unblemished hands, at her slightly gangly legs. 'Why are we like this, Artemis?' she asked softly. 'I'm… I'm what you would call a teenager again. I've lost forty years off my body. And you…'

'The time stream has aged me appropriately, I suppose,' replied the teenager. 'I _am_ technically seventeen years old. It is all probably cosmetic–'

'You better _hope_ it's just cosmetic,' interrupted Mulch.

The car drove on.

* * *

><p>'<em>Ah-temis!<em>' crowed a voice through tinny laptop speakers, causing Butler's flesh to crawl. '_You find your daddy yet?_'

The bodyguard was fixing himself a light snack in the plane's galley. He was listening with one ear to the loud-speaker conversation in the main cabin, wondering why Artemis had chosen to broadcast it at all. He would usually keep such business calls to himself.

Kronski was speaking, drawling. '_Anything I can do to help, you be sure to let your Uncle Damon know._'

It sounded so sordid, so wrong.

Butler reached for the vegetable knife and started slicing a cucumber as if it had dealt him a deadly insult. He peered around the panelled doorway. Artemis's brow was creased as if he had come up against an unanticipated problem, an ill-tuned key on one of his precious pianos. Butler reached for a bell pepper – beheaded it. Artemis said something in his best 'business voice', the one that had almost chipped the bodyguard's heart the first time he'd heard it.

He frowned, listened to a few more lines of weighted, pressured conversation.

_The intruder: he had known about the lemur. _

But that man was either in custody or dead. Butler hoped he was in custody. If he was, he would find a way to get him out. He would drag him to the manor if he had to. He would put to the bed these stupid—

He found a plate, thin, bone-china, looked down at it.

'_I cannot look that different.'_

He had shot the gorilla. It would have been better for him and Artemis, his _principal_, if he had just let nature take its course. He would not have to be worrying now; about his name being revealed; about the man's knowledge of their movements; about—

In the main cabin, Artemis had apparently finished his conversation. He had reclined his chair and closed those piercing, scheming eyes of his. He looked a different boy when he was sleeping.

Butler stood there a moment, scrutinising his charge's slackened features.

'_I cannot look that different.'_

He quietly closed the door to the galley.

* * *

><p>Mulch stretched loudly outside of the car, his back cracking in at least six places. The car was parked on farmer's land, a few hundred metres from the 'natural' hillock that masked Tara shuttle port from prying human eyes. The sun was rising, its first rays just beginning to peep over the horizon, the last breaths of a morning mist swirling around Artemis's bare ankles.<p>

'And you're sure we will be able to commandeer a shuttle from here?' he asked, the grass dew cool against his soles.

Holly clambered out of the far-side door. 'We will if Mr Diggums here wants his reward.'

'Chuh!' sneered Mulch. 'You ain't got nothing to worry about. Me and my cousin Nord…'

Holly yawned pointedly. Mulch's reply was to turn his back and undo the button on his bum flap. Artemis sighed.

'Look at him,' he said wistfully, as Mulch rapidly disappeared into a newly-dug, vibrating tunnel. 'Nine more of him in my employ and I could conquer the world.'

Holly hoisted herself up, sitting back against the car's windscreen so her legs covered the 'G' and the 'A' in the GARDA stencilled across the bonnet. 'The world, Arty?' she said, half-jokingly. 'Which one?'

Artemis frowned, his eyebrows almost touching. 'Arty?'

The elf gave a lopsided smile. 'Sorry. It's what your parents call you, isn't it?'

'Yes, it is. And it's… it's fine.'

She looked quickly away towards the dawn.

Birds were beginning to stir in nearby nests, chirruping softly. Artemis took a deep breath in and out, allowed his shoulders to sink. They felt as if they'd been braced for centuries. Had he only been inside this latest catastrophe for a single night?

His mother's face appeared in his mind's eye, pale, drawn, wasting away. Then Butler is chasing him, Mulch, the gorilla's jaws open wide. And then—

'_Of course I came. You couldn't do without me.'_

Artemis flinched as if burnt.

When he turned around again Holly was looking at him. Artemis walked towards her, managed to pull himself up onto the bonnet whilst still gingerly protecting his ribs.

'I'll just tell Craig to take this back when we go,' she said softly as he was settling, her eyes closed again. 'No-one should suspect that we borrowed it… I suppose you've never been in the back of a Mud Man police car before?'

Artemis shook his head. 'Never.'

'And I guess you've never taken on a gorilla before either?'

'This is…' He hesitated, that strange heat rising in his face again, blossoming visibly across his cheeks. 'This has been a night for firsts.'

'I never understood why you always wore suits before, but now I'm kind of getting it. They feel smart, don't they? This shirt is so soft…'

He was quiet for the longest moment.

'_You couldn't do without me._'

Holly frowned and opened her eyes to find him holding his long face in his hands.

'Artemis?'

The boy groaned quietly.

'Artemis, what's wrong?'

'Oh _God,_' he said, almost too softly for her to catch it.

Holly put a hand on his arm, worried now. 'Hey. It's alright. We're going to get that lemur back. We're a team. We can—'

'I mean, _Oh God, I think I kissed you_.'

Her hand froze. The birds twittered on, apparently unaware of the gravity of the moment.

'I mean,' the boy tore his hands from his face, still not looking at her, 'I _know _I kissed you. I just can't believe…'

Holly ran swiftly through a mental checklist: awkwardness, mild aphasia, face the colour of a freshly-boiled Savoylobster.

_Oh Frond, _she thought with a jolt. _This is real._

'Listen to me,' he snapped, making Holly jump. 'Babbling. A supposed _genius_. Ignore me, Holly. I should never have brought it up.'

'We can talk about it,' she said in a strangely high voice, before she'd really thought about what she was proposing. 'I mean, if you need to just…' She flapped her hands weakly and made a sort of raspberry noise.

He was staring at her now as if in mild pain. 'It must be this body,' he said, before she had the chance to add anything else. 'I have been violently projected into the latter stages of puberty and am unused to the impulses encouraged by the resulting rise in hormone levels.'

'Yes,' said Holly, jumping on that band wagon. 'I agree.'

'I will return to the future, regain my usual body and the impulses should cease.'

_Impulses, _thought Holly.

They were quiet for a moment. Craig had the radio playing in the car beneath them and she could hear the rhythmic beat of some 90s euro-pop song.

'Why did you come after me, Holly?' asked Artemis quietly.

She looked at him, tried to smile jokingly. 'Because I saw you in your red boxers and thought, "I can't let those—"'

'Really.'

Her voice was easier this time. 'Because you're my friend and you deserved my help.'

He stared at her, scrutinising her features, searching them. 'Honestly?' he whispered.

Before she quite knew what she was doing, she had snatched up his hand in hers and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.

'_Yes_,' she said determinedly, looking into his wide eyes. 'Of course.' She dropped his fingers and slid down from the car bonnet. 'Now come on. Fifteen minutes are up.'

Artemis just sat there a moment, listening to Holly _mesmerising_ Craig. When the car shifted beneath his rear he decided to get off. And when he looked up again, Holly was standing there waiting for him, dangling a pair of police-issue size nines by the laces.

* * *

><p>As soon as the shuttle was airborne and rattling towards Morocco, Artemis disappeared towards the shower.<p>

'Don't use the green stuff,' warned Mulch wisely as he passed. 'It'll make your party kit tingle for _days_.'

'Duly noted,' the teenager had said as Holly had looked pointedly at the control board.

Holly and Mulch's conversation dulled to distant murmurs as Artemis reached the back of the shuttle. The machinery was louder here, the pumping roar of mechanics humans could little fathom. He ducked his head inside the washroom – he would have to stoop, but it was useable.

He dumped his borrowed clothes in a heap on the floor in perhaps the first teenage gesture of his life. There were pronounced battle lines on his arms and legs where his clean skin ended and the muck began. He frowned and stepped purposefully towards the shower.

Once inside he let the (uncomfortably hot, as always was the case with fairy showers) water pound against his forehead. He squeezed his eyes tight.

And tried to block out the fact that he was—

_No, _he thought. _Don't even think it._

* * *

><p>Artemis emerged a while later, bereft of blood and mud, his wet hair tied back in a low ponytail.<p>

'Finally!' Mulch scrabbled to his feet, tossing aside the empty box of rations he'd chewed his way through. 'We thought you'd drowned yourself in there, Mud Boy.'

The teen pulled at the collar of one the few human-sized pieces of clothing he'd managed to forage: a T-shirt declaring his love for Vienna. 'I was doing something called _cleaning myself_, Mr Diggums,' he replied. 'You may have read about it.'

'_Cleaning_, huh? Is that what you Mud Man are calling it?' The dwarf elbowed him conspiratorially, adding an unnecessary wink. 'Just so long as you washed things out afterwards, eh? I'm not going to judge you this time – I know it's been a stressful morning for you.'

Artemis glared at the dwarf as he swaggered back the way the teenager had come. 'Whatever you are insinuating—'

'It's perfectly healthy. Don't be embarrassed.'

The dwarf had disappeared by the time Artemis had drawn breath enough for his next response.

'Nice 'do,' injected Holly, looking at him from over the back of a spare seat in the supplies area.

He walked purposefully towards the shuttle's controls. 'I took a bobble from the Bentley.'

'A what?'

'A hair tie. It's presumably one of Juliet's.'

'Suppose it'd be a bit weird if it were Butler's.'

She finally caught his eye.

_Oh Frond, _she thought, her chest tightening.

'You should get some rest,' said the teenager, turning his back to her again, glancing over the shuttle's instruments. 'We won't arrive in Fez for another two hours at least.'

'You should be the one sleeping,' she replied, heat in her cheeks. 'All I've done so far is get dressed and driven around.'

Artemis passed his hand over a few monitors. Tapped a few buttons.

'I've got food here if you're hungry,' she said, eyes darting desperately to anything but his tall, slim figure. 'I hid it from Mulch. It's a crap flavour, but–'

A loose boulder hit the starboard side of the shuttle. It rocked the whole of the cabin, causing Holly to grab the table and Artemis's injured ribs to collide heavily with the side of the co-pilot's seat. He hissed with pain, one hand leaping out to the armrest to steady himself.

Holly rolled her eyes. 'Come here' she said, clicking her neck as she walked towards him, the magic surging into her fingertips. 'That gorilla _did _hurt you, didn't it? Is it your ribs?'

Artemis was just righting himself when he saw Holly's hand in the tail of eye, inches from his sleeve, sparks curving about her tiny knuckles.

'_No,_' he blurted.

And it was Holly's turn to gasp as one, surprisingly strong, Mud Man forearm lashed out at her wrist, knocking it aside. The sparks disappeared from her fingers and rushed to the impact spot.

She stared at him, her arm thrown back in the air, the skin throbbing harshly. Artemis stared back.

'Ow,' said Holly quietly, lowering her hand.

'I'm sorry,' said Artemis, in a tone she had never heard from him before. He sounded shocked, mortified. 'I… I didn't mean to hit you so hard.'

Something chilled inside Holly. 'But you did mean to hit me?'

'I meant to stop you.' His eyes darted to her arm. 'Are you alright? Is your–?'

'I'm fine.'

She walked away from him. Artemis stayed where he was. He watched as she sat back into the passenger's chair.

'Go on then,' she snapped, talking to the plastic table top. 'Why can't I heal you?'

He still didn't move. 'You are intelligent enough to hazard a guess.'

'Spelltrophy?'

'It is probably incubating. Maybe I am more resilient than my mother. My age, my sex, my higher exposure to magic – anything could be a contributing factor.'

'How do you know you have it?'

'Because I stole magic from the time stream. I must have developed a form of it and passed it on.'

Holly took a moment to take this in. Then she groaned, pushed her fingers back into her hair, stretching the skin at the corners of her eyes. '_D'arvit,_ Artemis…'

Artemis sat calmly on the edge of the pilot's chair.

Outside the narrow windscreen, the depths of the earth sped by in impenetrable shadow.

Then a thought crashed through Holly's mind like a boulder. 'Did I do it?' she blurted. She looked at him, eyes widening. '_D'arvit_. You've worked it out already, haven't you? I've healed you dozens of times. I healed your mother straight after the siege. _I'm _the only one who could have passed it to you.'

Artemis had started shaking his head before she finished speaking. 'The siege was too long ago–'

'You said this is a new strain. Who knows how long someone can be infected before the disease shows? I must be some sort of carrier.'

'No.'

Holly could feel herself growing angry. She put a palm to her forehead, her breathing suddenly ragged. 'I've healed your father, Juliet, Butler. Frond, Butler's practically scar tissue sewn together with my magic thread–'

'Calm down.'

'_Calm?' _She was shaking now, her fingers trembling against her legs. 'Frond, Artemis. My mother… my mother died because humans poisoned her. I hated them. I wanted to murder them all. You… you must hate me too.'

Artemis's expression was placid. His next words were pronounced clinically. Sharply.

'I did it,' he said.

Holly shook her head. 'Not possible. Spelltrophy needs magic—'

'I had magic. I have just told you that. I stole from the time stream—'

'Only to use it all up getting back from Hybras!'

'No, Holly, I took some with me afterwards. I used it to _mesmerise_ my parents into forgetting I'd been missing for three years.'

The words swirled around the elf's mind. She couldn't process them. They couldn't grip onto anything solid.

'But…' she whispered, 'I tested you. I probed your head.'

'Not affectively. I managed to dupe you after our return from Hybras and I had used up all my remaining reserves in trying to heal my mother before you arrived to probe me a second time in my parent's bedroom.'

His hand reached out to prod another few buttons on the shuttle's console.

'In one fell swoop,' he continued, 'I have signed my own death warrant and most probably orphaned my two three-year-old brothers.'

He considered these words for a moment, as if someone else had spoken. Then he snorted with mirth.

Holly's eyes narrowed. 'Why are you laughing?'

His fingers swiped at a lever, tapped four times at the travel estimate gauge.

'Because if I don't,' he said eventually, his voice still level, 'I'm afraid I'll commit to the opposite.' He flicked a final switch. 'And that would be... counterproductive.'

* * *

><p>Holly threw down the kit bag into the sand. It landed with a heavy thump and slipped over the golden grains.<p>

'No way am I going out there,' said Mulch, looking down over the elf's shoulder. 'I'll fry like a Mars Bar in a Scottish chip shop.'

'But you must go all the same,' said Artemis, peering through the hatch.

Mulch scowled. 'What did I say about the _musts_, Mr Mud Man?'

Holly threw the loose tail of her head scarf back over her shoulder for the tenth time in five minutes. 'Think of the lock up, Mulch. Think of the gold,' she said irritably before flinging her body out of the hatch, landing as gracefully as one could land in a golf bunker when dropped from a height.

'I'm being serious,' hissed Mulch, grabbing a handful of Artemis's knee-length shirt – yet another costume change. 'I _can't _go out in that. My body is a sensitive temple that needs wet mud and plenty of shade. And chicken.'

The teenager wrapped long fingers around the dwarf's wrists. 'Your sun cream will protect you. Get underground, stay beneath the souk right up until Holly's signal. You will have minimal exposure.'

Mulch's fingers slowly unlocked. 'You better deliver, Mud Boy.'

'For both our sake's, Mr Diggums.' Artemis launched himself after Holly, landing, predictably, on his already injured side.

'Is he coming?' asked the elf, already sitting astride a softly tutting yellow scooter she'd activated from her kit bag.

'He's making his way,' replied Artemis, dusting himself off with a wince. 'And I'll be driving, Holly. Move back.'

The elf snorted. 'Over my dead body.'

'It will soon be over mine if you don't.'

Her face dropped.

Artemis sighed, rubbing briefly at the wrinkles on his brow. 'My apologies. I shouldn't be so flippant. But you are on the surface now, Holly. You are three feet two inches in height. I don't wish to be pulled over by Moroccan officials because a five-year-old appears to be in control of a motor vehicle.'

Holly didn't move.

The teenager looked out across the sand and then back at her. 'I am _sorry_,' he reiterated.

She moved back. Slowly.

Artemis clambered on in front of her and decided to skip his usual enquiries as to whether the kit was all accounted for – he knew her reply would only be a brief and colourful affirmative. He twisted back his wrist and the scooter took off. The sudden lurch took them both by surprise and a thin pair of arms shot around Artemis's middle.

'Sorry again,' said Artemis, slightly flustered. 'I'm unused to the–'

'Just drive,' barked Holly over the strained engine noise, her face turned sideways against the back of his shirt. 'And try not to be so _flippant _with my life, yeah?'

_I suppose I deserved that, _thought Artemis, and tried to concentrate on the terrain and not the warm pressure circling his waist.

* * *

><p>'Your decoy is in place,' said the ten-year-old quietly. 'If, by some miracle, those strangers are still after the lemur, as the recording from the boot of the Bentley suggested, and have escaped police custody, then we will have the souk watched from every angle. And you will be able to accost anyone who appears.'<p>

Butler nodded. He couldn't see how either the squat bearded creature or the lanky teen could have followed them all the way to Morocco after the cage debacle but Master Artemis had never had the best of luck.

_And if they do come, you'll have a chance to get some things straight…_

Both principle and bodyguard were stood under a ragged shop canopy, a street vendor yelling out the worth and weights of his wares beside them. A heaving mixture of tourists and locals thronged the street ahead of them. Many were fanning themselves, their bodies wilting in the midday heat, squinting at the wooden price boards on the stalls. It was nearing lunchtime, and the rush was on.

Cursing Artemis's choice in business partners and their choice of meeting places in turn, Butler quickly pulled on the ragged cloak he'd brought from the hire Jeep and bent his knees until he was somewhere near an average height. Sweat immediately began to bead on his shaven crown.

'Ready, sir,' he grunted.

The ten-year-old gave the briefest of nods.

He watched the boy move away from him through the crowd of tourists and chattering locals, the lemur's cage held out in his small arms, and waited until he was some distance ahead before following.

_Here we go, _thought Butler, padding along behind, trying not to focus on the itchiness of the cloth.

When he reached the souk Kronski was already waiting for Artemis, breathing the rank air deeply as if he were stood in a Cotswold meadow and not a thriving workshop of skins and pigeon shit.

'Ah, Arty!' called the grinning doctor. 'What took you so long?'

And so the exchange began.

* * *

><p>Beneath the earth, Mulch was simultaneously sweating and swearing. It was too hot here. Far far too hot. The tunnel from the shuttle to the souk had been one of the worst he'd ever dug. He had struggled to swallow every mouthful, sand and Frond knew what else coating the inside of his cheeks.<p>

'What's going on Mud Man?' he spat into the mike, coming to a stop and wrenching down the sodden front of his oversuit. 'I'm dying here. Seriously. Ten minutes and I'm not gonna be able to collect that gold. I'll just be a dwarfy puddle seeping into the sand.'

A pause and then: '_Patience, Mr Diggums_.'

Mulch snorted, unzipping the front of his undersuit, his furry chest heaving. 'I promise you, Mud Man. If I don't get a call soon I'll be going anyway. I can't be hanging around here.'

He turned his head and spat bitterly, and thought he could hear the phlegm sizzling against the crumbling dirt.

* * *

><p>Artemis the elder rolled his eyes and went back to sucking on his tongue, having bitten it accidently when his knees had clapped his teeth together getting into this glorified pea pod Holly called a 'hide'.<p>

_I shall have to design a larger version for future use, _he thought, his mouth full of the taste of iron. _I am almost fully grown now. I can barely fit into a shuttle seat anymore. _

He could see the small, head-scarfed figure of Holly on the western side of the souk digging at the side of her head.

_What is she now, in human terms? _He wondered absently._ Eighteen? Sixteen, perhaps? _

'As if that matters,' he muttered angrily, shifting his focus back to the task at hand.

_She is unlikely to want to go anywhere near you after this latest misadventure. Once again, you have managed to trick and injure someone dearest to you. _

Butler's outline was easily visible laid out on the canopy of the souk, watching over the ten-year-old Artemis striding calmly towards the grinning Kronski. The elder Artemis would recognise that mammoth silhouette anywhere. He narrowed his eyes at his younger self.

_I can't believe I did this, _he thought. _Regardless of how desperate I was. _

Then: 'Stop drawing attention to your ear piece,' he said aloud. 'A little unprofessional, _Captain._'

As he listened to Holly's bolshie reply through his own ear piece, his eyes snapped away from his younger self to the stooped figure slinking closer to the elf's position.

* * *

><p>Holly tossed back the tail of her head scarf yet again, then reached up to fix her dislodged ear piece. She couldn't wait until she could wrench the whole thing off and get zipped back in her LEP uniform.<p>

_Which is eight years away in Artemis's closet. _

She scowled.

This had to make the top ten of the worst places Artemis's schemes had taken her to. Perhaps a close third to the Arctic tundra they'd trailed across before getting shot at by goblins. She was crouched behind a brick vat, hiding from the view of Artemis's behemoth of a bodyguard whilst still keeping the little Arty in her sights. It had been over ten minutes and she still wasn't used to the smell.

_At least you don't have to drink it or something. _

That thought made her gag a little.

_Get a grip. You're not a teenager. _

Yes, she needed to remember that. The kiss in the cage, that moment on the police car…

_Frond…_

But those moments had been completely chilled by the newly revealed truth of why they were really running around eight years in the past. And the thought was still making her angry enough to clench her fists until the nails cut into her palms.

_This is hardly the first time he's lied to you_.

But this was a matter of trust. She had thought they were past this. That they had built more of a bond than this.

_He could have told me months ago that he'd managed to nick some sparks from the time stream. I wouldn't have dobbed him in. I could have helped him._

Bullshit.

_Well, he should have at least told me he believed himself to be infected. I could have healed him in that gorilla cage without a clue and then we'd both be in need of that lemur._

She twisted angrily at her ear piece.

Little Artemis was exchanging banter with Kronski, who didn't seem to be arsed about the stench from the vats much to the little boy's chagrin.

'_Stop drawing attention to your ear piece,' _drawled Artemis's toneless voice in Holly's ear, making her jump and not really helping her situation. '_It's a little unprofessional, Captain._'

'_F'koff_, Arty,' she replied, using a somewhat forceful Gnommish word for 'mind your own business'.

A shadow loomed over her position.

Then Artemis's robotic voice blurted '_Holly, look left_' and her head snapped around.

* * *

><p>Butler's keen eyes had been keeping an eye on everything in the souk and, up till then, they hadn't spotted anything out of the ordinary. So there were Kronski's local guards, and a few vat workers who were curious about what was going on with the boy, the monkey cage and the fat Louisianan dressed as a colonel – but nothing suspicious…<p>

Then he'd spotted the little girl crouched down the side of one brick vat with an apparent ear problem.

_A daughter of one of the workers?_ Butler had wondered.

The girl was clearly agitated. Her eyes narrowed, lips pursed.

And Butler's soldier senses were suddenly pounding.

He had looked back to his master. Artemis's face was impassive, professional. Kronski was saying something about dollars. He looked back to the girl.

Her petite, strangely mature features had crunched into a scowl. She opened her mouth.

Butler lip read her words, and moved immediately towards her vat.

The girl's head snapped towards him and Butler suddenly knew for certain that the thing she had been itching was an ear piece. Her gaze caught him and the sight of her eyes caused his heart to leap. One hazel, one blue. Just like the teenage stranger.

'_Stop,_' she ordered, in English, in a voice of a thousand cathedral choirs.

* * *

><p>Artemis the elder watched disaster strike, once again, without being able to do much about it.<p>

With the first step the cloaked figure took towards Holly, their height growing with each footfall, Artemis realised the man on the canopy was a decoy. Holly turned on the now fully revealed Butler, stopping him in her tracks with a burst of the _Mesmer. _

On the other side of the souk, Artemis the younger passed the lemur's cage over to Kronski's happy embrace – just as Mulch, overheated and overly hunger, finally lost patience, bursting out of the earth and snatching it back. The ten-year-old Artemis, along with an American family of six, staggered back, taken completely off guard, and the robbed Doctor Kronski released a piercing wail. This snapped Butler out of his mesmerised state and sending one huge, open-palmed hand soaring towards Holly's head.

Artemis winced as she crashed to the ground, her magic, now unsupervised, fizzing up to fix the bruise blossoming on her cheek. A few vat workers and five members of a Spanish tour group cried out. Butler ignored them, standing at his full height, his gaze snapping towards his young ward.

Artemis the younger was apparently fine having, incredibly, whipped out his phone and begun filming a now wailing Kronski. Both Butler and Artemis the elder spared a second to take in this almost unbelievable choice of action. Then Butler was striding across the compound.

'Time to go,' he growled, gripping the ten-year-old by the scruff of his shirt.

Then Kronski's yells changed shape. He had both feet back on the ground now, his empty, phlegm-covered hands turned to claws in front of him, his chest heaving with anguish. 'Stop them!' he screamed, all traces of swagger vanished. 'Get them!'

About 12 vat workers brought various sabres and fire arms out from beneath their work clothes, surging forward to block Butler and the little Artemis's path. Butler pulled his Sig Sauer from beneath his cloak and more tourists started to scream.

_D'arvit,_ thought Artemis.

He snatched up the spare charge control he had never intended to use and slammed his palm down onto it.

Each vat exploded in perfectly choreographed style. Artemis watched as each dye pit vomited its contents fifteen feet into the air before gravity told control again, splattering each unfortunate occupant of the souk.

Chaos reigned. But no blood was shed. Artemis watched Butler's escape, his pigeon-poop-soaked younger self staggering uselessly along behind him before the bodyguard scooped him up and they fled up a dusty alleyway.

Artemis activated the release for the pod door.

_Mulch has the lemur. I need only grab Holly and go._

* * *

><p>On the souk floor Kronski was recovering from this further catastrophe. Soaking wet and bereft of both his cash and his prize purchase, the doctor swivelled around, searching for the Fowl boy and his hulking assistant. His guards were running at all angles, slipping, yelling, crashing into residents and tourists alike.<p>

_No,_ he thought desperately. _No. That sonovabitch ain't going to pull this over on me. Where is it? Where? _

Out of the corner of his eye his saw a dark haired, light-skinned figure dart towards the west side of the souk.

His eyes narrowed behind his purple glasses.

'_Get him!_' he screeched, jabbing a finger in the teenager's direction.

One guard caught Kronski's instruction and yelled in rapid French to another. The huge, bare-chested thug stepped directly into the young man's path. Kronski watched his mismatched eyes widen and felt a rush of loathing.

'Why hello there, boy,' said the doctor, as the roughly-dressed teen was dragged, kicking and squirming, towards the sodden ground directly in front of him.

The teenager's dark hair had fallen out of the band tying it behind his head, and he was twisting viciously in his captor's grip. 'Let me _go_. _Let me go!'_

Kronski nodded to the hired thug and the young man was dropped into the muck.

'Where's my lemur?' asked Kronski.

The teenager scrabbled immediately back to his feet. 'What is the meaning of this?' he demanded, in a clipped, well-bred English accent. 'How _dare _you accost me in this manner?'

Kronski gestured to another guard and the boy was seized once again. This time a curved knife was pressed close to his pale throat.

'There has been a misunderstanding,' insisted the teen, swallowing, the blade riding on his Adam's apple. 'I am the son of General Lee–'

'Save it, kid,' said Kronski. 'What are you? Fowl's cousin or something?'

'I don't know what you're talking about. I am the–'

The guard moved and a small cut, nothing more than a shaving nick, caused a bead of blood to dribble into the young man's collar. The teenager stopped struggling.

'You were assisting that brat,' said Kronski slowly, in his dangerous drawl. 'Look at you. Gonna take more than a pair of sandals and a long shirt to make you blend in here, boy. You ain't fooling no-one. Bit of a haircut and I'd say you were that kid's brother. You were in on this bit of fuckery, I know it. You've teamed up and stashed my lemur away somewhere and I _will _be getting it back.' He took a step closer, the sun glinting off his tinted spectacles. 'So I'll ask you again. Where's my lemur?'

The boy shook his head tightly and drew another short breath as the knife sliced into his skin.

Noise was beginning to gather at the entrances to the souk. The crowds were beginning to come back, possibly bringing police with them. Kronski sighed.

'Come on,' he said, turning on his well-heeled heel. 'I've a feeling he'll be more talkative after a little time back at the compound.'

The young man was shoved forward, almost tripping over his own feet. He cast one worried, desperate glance back over his shoulder towards the tiny figure splayed unmoving beside one of the vats before a guard cracked him with a backhand across the cheek and the teen looked back no more.

* * *

><p><strong>DUN DUN DUUUUUUN<strong>

**I doth love role reversal.**

**Do you?**

**Review...?**


	3. Mr Butler

**Here we go. Part three!**

**Lots of angst I'm afraid. And warnings in advance for violence and reference to torture. **

**For added angst, listen to Katy McAllister's cover of Wonderwall while reading.**

** Wonderwall, in all its myriad of forms on my ipod, is basically the song of this fic. It's a nineties classic! Fits the timezone.**

**Cheers to everyone who's reviewed this so far. I really hope you'll like this and review again. **

* * *

><p><span>Chapter Three – Mr Butler<span>

To count the number of times Artemis had almost been beaten up he would have to use his fingers, his toes and most of the digits of a willing volunteer. In the past, when a fight had stirred between either him and his schoolmates or some frustrated, prize-winning scientist Butler had always been there to stop the fists before they fell.

Well, almost always.

Holly Short had managed to land two blows to his face and numerous thwacks to his shoulders, back, ribs and upper arms. Artemis knew most of it was her aggressive way of showing affection. Again, most of it.

Artemis' lips twitched.

And a weathered, dirty hand slapped him hard across his already bruised cheek.

'No laughing,' ordered the guard in roughly-accented English, his fat face slick with sweat. 'You think this funny?'

Artemis didn't reply. Talking had become almost impossible since a blow to the throat by a different guard over an hour ago. Not to mention his lips felt the size of balloons.

Someone behind him grabbed his hair, wrenching his sore head back.

'He asked you question,' drawled a new voice.

Artemis's left eye was a puckered mess, so he had no choice but to stare at Damon Kronski with his right.

The leader of the Extinctionists had changed into a rhino-skin suit. Short and portly as he was, all he was missing was the horn and his transformation would be complete.

'How're you feeling, boy?' asked the billionaire, as if Artemis were a young cousin he was keen to catch up with. 'You feel like talking yet?'

Artemis closed his good eye and drew a few laboured breaths.

Kronski clicked his tongue. 'Guess not.'

A door banged open at the end of Artemis's spacious prison. The teenager believed it to be some sort of storage space, not having had the opportunity to explore it properly. He had been thrown inside some hours previously and stamped on and kicked until every scrap of him was either throbbing or bleeding into the dirt floor. All he could do was breathe, his face pressed to the dust, pipes clanking and groaning in the low ceiling above him.

_Go to your happy place, _he had thought. _Isn't that what Butler does?_

Two men were dragging a metal tub towards him. Artemis heard the sound of liquid slopping over the sides and his breathing hitched.

The fat Louisianan grinned. 'Oh no, boy,' he said with a chuckle. 'This ain't for drinking. This is for talking.'

Artemis was dragged onto his knees before the tub, the guard's fingers still laced tightly into his hair.

Kronski crouched down opposite him. 'Now,' he said, business-like. 'Me and my staff've had enough of this silent treatment. It's getting boring. I'm gonna ask you my questions, and you're gonna give me answers. Or you'll be getting the tub. So, boy, where is my lemur?'

Artemis hoped to every god named to man that it was with a recovered Holly and Mulch, speeding towards Ireland about to leap through the time stream and save his family's lives. He didn't have a clock in here, he had lost almost all sense of time, but he was certain it was far too late for the elf to attempt a rescue mission and still make No.1's deadline at the manor.

The teenager's heart ached more than any other part of his battered body.

He looked up into Kronski's wide, expectant face, gathered as much phlegm as he could at the back of his parched throat, and spat.

The extinctionist roared with outrage, Artemis felt several hairs part company with his scalp and his head was sent plunging beneath the lukewarm waters of the tub.

* * *

><p>Holly came to slowly.<p>

She could hear people chattering, the clatter of footsteps, screeches, yells, the rhythmic clank of metal on metal; paprika and cattle shit swirled in her nostrils, leather, fire, something spicy hissing from a pan. Her back ached, arched back against something rough prickling her skin. A dog barked, cloth brushed softly against her elbow, a voice murmured to her left, soft and concerned.

Holly's voice scratched in her throat. 'Artemis….?'

A female face with kind, crinkled eyes appeared above her. The elf's head was lifted by a gentle hand and a cup placed to her lips. Holly drank greedily.

'Thank you,' she gasped, water dripping down her chin, and the woman smiled.

Holly hands bunched in the material beneath her. She was laid on a crate, cushioned by a few roughly-stuffed packets of straw. The woman's stall reared up in front of her, shielding her from the melee of faces on the busy street with its baskets full of pet feed, cages drooping from the canopy, stuffed with squawking fowls…

'Artemis,' murmured Holly, the name slicing through her groggy thoughts like a smelling salt.

'You were hurt,' said the woman in soothing Arabic. 'My son brought you here to me.'

Holly squinted at her.

_Why didn't Artemis pick me up? He was there, in the hide. Waiting._

She sat up, pushing back against the straw, wiping her sleeve across her mouth. She checked her scarf was still in place. Miraculously, it was. 'Did your son see… a boy when he took me? A teenager? Tall, black hair. Very pale.'

The woman's face was blank. 'He said there were only policemen.'

She gestured to a gawky boy stacking boxes of sawn-up pig bones.

'This is Tarik,' said the woman, beaming. 'He carried you.'

Her son couldn't have been more than 14. He smiled shyly, wiping his stained hands self-consciously on his apron front. Holly stared at him, his young face blurring with Artemis's.

_Where is he? Where is he? _

She got up, staggering slightly. 'Thank you, Tarik. And…'

'Mouna.'

'Mouna. Thank you so much.'

The woman placed a hand on her shoulder. 'You should stay longer, little one. Rest a while. Where are your family?'

Holly gave a sad smile. 'A long way away. I've got to get back to them.'

Mouna frowned but let her hand slip. '_Fi Amanullah_.'

Holly nodded. '_Jazak Allahu khair_.'

And she hobbled forward into the throng of the crowd.

* * *

><p>Artemis couldn't stop shivering. He was soaked from head to waist, water dripping slowly from the tips of his collar and hair. After the failed interrogation, Kronski had had him trussed with plastic cable ties and left to lie in the dust again. The teenager was grateful for the quiet. And the freedom to breathe.<p>

Kronski's guards had pushed him to the very edge of despair.

_Don't think about it. You need to make your next move before they return. _

And Kronski had promised him that he would return.

Artemis gritted his teeth and sat up. It was a painful effort, his abused abdominals screamed at him to stop. But he managed it.

His wrists were bound behind his back and his ankles were trussed together. For his next move, he would have to rely on the one developed physical advantage he did possess over most people.

'Thank you, Butler,' he muttered, raising his knees to his chest and feeling grateful at last for the years of yoga tutelage from his erstwhile bodyguard.

Biting down hard on his lower lip, he stretched his aching shoulders back and struggled until he passed his bound hands under his backside and out over his legs. Once this was accomplished he allowed himself 30 seconds to recover. Then onto step two. He bit down hard on the surplus plastic of the cable tie, yanking at it until his bindings were as tight as he could get them. He swung his legs under him so he was kneeling, braced himself, and smacked his bound hands as quickly as he could into his lower stomach.

He swore as his wrists ricocheted away to no effect.

He allowed himself ten more seconds of rest then tried again. He gripped the plastic with the side of his mouth, cranking the tie painfully tight. Pins and needles stabbed at his fingertips.

He tossed his damp hair away from his face.

'Three… two… one–'

He hit his stomach again. This time the strain was too much and the tie cracked open.

Artemis almost fell back to floor with relief. He massaged the angry welts on his wrist as his bloodshot eyes darted about the room. It was a basement of abandoned things. Industrial items mostly. Gas canisters, tools, nails, sheet metal. He crawled to where a rusty handsaw lay near the wall under a film of dust and muck. It would not have been much use to a professional carpenter blunted as it was but it made quick work of the plastic ties at his ankles.

With all limbs free he could finally stand. His head was so light he could have floated away. The pain of his injuries kept him grounded.

There were two exits from his prison. One was guarded by two, maybe three, guards. He could hear their guttural chatter through the closed metal door. They were gambling or playing cards, bickering, laughing and occasionally banging a fist against something hard. The other exit was a rusted fire escape of some sort. That was guarded by thick chains and a padlock the size of Butler's fist.

Artemis limped across to a bay of ancient butane canisters, gripping one by the top and dragging it to the fire escape, leaving a single dark line in the dirt. Ignoring his body's protests he hoisted the canister up. He waited, arms trembling, for the guards to roar as one at some twist in their game before releasing a jet of freezing gas at the chains. Once they were thoroughly doused he dropped the canister with a muffled clang.

_Quickly, quickly. _

Some saint had left a sawn-off length of steel pole leaning besides the sheet metal. Artemis rammed it through the now brittle chains and twisted it with as much strength as he had left. For one heart-breaking moment Artemis thoughts the chains weren't going to give. He felt a terrible weakness flood his muscles.

_So what if you can't escape? You'll never see your family in the future. You'll die in this time, alone, succumbing slowly to the symptoms of spelltrophy. _

Then the chains broke away.

Artemis scrabbled for the handle of the door.

Only for it to open for him.

Damon Kronski had changed again. No more rhino. He was a tiger now.

'Nice try, boy,' drawled the extinctionist. 'I know they're hard to see, this being a gloomy place and all, but I do have cameras put up in the corners there.'

He nodded and the two guards flanking him surged forward. Artemis didn't bother to put up a struggle as he was kicked back into the dirt like a dog.

* * *

><p>Artemis Fowl the Second was on the edge of sleep. His seat was reclined and blackout blinds were pulled low over the cabin's executive windows. The padded leather beneath his body was heated and soft, his breathing slow and his long eyelashes brushed against his cheeks. Kronski's cash was sat in its fat package in the jet's on board safe and would soon be cashed and wired to the hotel hosting his father's would-be rescue team. That lemur was out of his hands and into the grubby mitts of whatever had decided to steal it from the good doctor.<p>

It had been a close one at the souq. He had not anticipated sabotage from beneath. Butler's hand on the scruff of his neck, tourists screaming, the black eyes of stolen pistols turning their gazes on him – there had suddenly been so many guards. So many ways to die.

His eyes opened and the darkness pressed on his eyeballs.

Because a dreadful thought had flashed across his brain as he'd made eye contact with one hired assassin – that if he were to die there, his mother would have no-one. She would be left to her madness, taken into the care of the state to rot in some uncaring facility manned by clinical strangers. The trail for his father would be allowed to run cold. And both her Artemises would be lost.

The little boy swallowed hard.

He would have to make more money, that was a certainty, but hence forth he would be doing it by less reckless means. He couldn't afford to be lost to his mother, to his father. The family couldn't take another loss.

_Family first_, had been one of his father's most repeated phrases.

'Family first,' whispered his son.

He reached across his armrest, his fingers brushing the cream plastic handle of his on-board telephone. With any luck he would reach his mother in a lucid moment. He had a sudden aching to hear her voice. Hopefully, she would be pleased to hear him too…

Then something caught his eye. His laptop, left aside on another seat, was leaking light from the closed slit between keyboard and screen. Artemis touched a lamp to his left and squinted in the sudden glare.

He composed himself, ran a hand back through his slightly tousled hair and accepted the video call.

'Damon,' he said with contrived joviality, clicking the record button just in case he needed to watch this back later. 'I had been hoping I would never have to clap eyes on your sorry features again.'

'Sorry to disappoint you, boy.'

The deranged billionaire was standing close to the camera, his wide, shiny face filling the whole screen.

The ten-year-old's mouth was a thin line. He had thought he was done with this demonstrable man. He had left the shark cage far behind him in Morocco.

'What do you want, Damon?'

He side-eyed the abandoned telephone.

'You left something in Fez,' said Kronski. 'Something I'll guess you're already missing.'

Artemis's mind whirled through the short list of possibilities. He had the cash. And the cash was definitely real. Butler was busy in the cockpit flying the plane.

Exasperation leaked into his tone. 'I don't follow you, Damon. There is nothing I have left.'

'Oh, really?' And Kronski stood back.

The unhappy scene was set in what appeared to be a basement. Two of the guards Artemis recognised from the souq were stood against a chipped, unpainted wall, fully-stocked bandoliers crossed over their chests and machineguns clenched in their mammoth fists. Between them crouched a miserable, shuddering figure, a curtain of damp dark hair hiding their face. But the ten-year-old didn't need to see a face.

_You again,_ thought the boy, his lips almost twitching into a curious smile. _It seems our lives are still destined to collide._

'I found him wandering all alone in the souq,' continued Damon Kronski, strolling back towards the ragged man and clapping a hand to his shoulder. The figure started at the slap of palm on sodden cloth. 'I took him home with me. Wanted to keep him safe and sound.'

The boy dragged his eyes away from the shivering semi-stranger. 'That's very altruistic of you, Damon, but I fail to understand why I'm being informed.'

The Louisianan's laugh hissed like a rattle snake. He shook his heavy head. 'Now, now, boy. No games. I've had enough games from your kinsman here.'

'My kinsman?'

The doctor dipped his fat chins and the right-hand guard gripped the shivering man by his shirt, driving him to his feet, exposing his beaten, bloodied face to the camera.

The ten-year-old's nose wrinkled in disgust.

'I'm not blind, boy,' continued Kronski, with obviously strained calm. 'He might not look too aristocratic right now but before my men started on him he coulda been your older brother.'

Artemis sighed. 'I am an only child, Damon.'

'A _cousin _then. Or some bastard your dead daddy knocked up before he got around to bedding your mommy.'

The boy's fingers twitched. He was itching to slam the laptop lid on the entire conversation. On the entire day.

'All right. He was after the lemur when I was in Ireland,' he said in a clipped, impatient voice. 'He was there in the sanctuary I first took it from. My man… dealt with him. I am not his associate, nor his handler. He was after your _prize._'

'Too right he was. In cahoots with you.'

The boy had had enough. 'Frankly, I'm tired. It has been a long day. I was about to make a phone call...'

The punch that landed on the man's temple floored him so fast it was as if he'd dropped dead. Artemis's mouth released a traitorous gasp.

'_I ain't playing_,' spat Kronski, jabbing a now bloodied finger at the web cam. 'My dinner begins in four hours. I have nothing for the main entertainment. All because you colluded with this' – he sunk a pointed crocodile-skin boot into the man's stomach – '_mutt_, to take my money and my lemur.' His face crumpled as he noticed the stain on the hand that had hit his hostage. '_And now look what you've made me do._'

'You are insane,' breathed the ten-year-old.

The door to the cabin opened silently and Butler stepped through.

Kronski ran a flat, trembling palm back over his hair. He pulled down his rumpled suit jacket, schooled his features. 'No,' he said. 'I just want what I paid for.'

Artemis's voice, for once, was high and childish. '_He isn't a Fowl_. I gave you the lemur, _you lost it._'

He felt a shadow at his side and looked up. Butler studied the consternation on his charge's face before looking at the laptop.

'I am a generous person,' Kronski was saying. 'I'll give you three hours. When three hours are up, I'll kill your man.'

'Do as you wish,' said Artemis, before shooting out a hand and slamming the lid of the laptop down.

His chest was heaving as if he'd been running. For a moment he simply sat like that, breathing hard, his whole composure shaken. Then―

'This entire affair was a mistake,' declared the boy, pushing himself out of his chair and making for the cabin's mini bar. 'That _doctor _is a madman.'

_You're only just getting that now? _Thought the bodyguard.

'Why did he call?' he asked aloud.

Artemis had pulled a mineral water from the bar's fridge and was busy pouring it into a glass with unsteady hands. He drank two small cup-fulls before replying.

'Because he has managed to kidnap that mental patient from Rathdown Park and for some reason believes us to be related.'

Butler blinked. 'What?'

Artemis snapped his fingers impatiently. 'The young man in his underwear. He was attacked by that gorilla. He followed us to Fez and has got himself captured. Kronski believes him to be in my employ.'

The bodyguard took a step back to the laptop and flipped open the lid. Kronski's livid features were frozen on the screen from when Artemis had cut the link.

'He wants me to bring him the lemur,' continued the ten-year-old, his voice steady and back in control, 'in exchange for my _kinsman_.'

Butler rewound the recording. The sight of the young man's bloodied face as it was pushed up to the camera lit a cold fire somewhere deep in his chest.

'What are the conditions?' he asked quietly, not turning his eyes from the screen.

Artemis had carried his glass over to another seat and sat back languidly. 'I've got three hours,' he said, checking his perfect nails. 'It wouldn't matter if he'd given me 40.'

At these words Butler did look up. 'You're not going back?'

'No. Of course not.'

'Kronski… but Kronski has said he'll kill him.'

'Which is that boy's problem, not mine. I almost died today, your protection notwithstanding. For mother's sake, I cannot put myself at any serious risk again. I fully intend on returning to the manor and forgetting all about this little misadventure, mysterious kidnap victim and all.'

Butler looked back at the screen. He'd paused it with the beaten man in view, a black crust dried beneath his nostrils, a bloodied gap in his grimace where a canine had been knocked free of its housing.

Little Artemis was buttoning his blazer. 'If you would return to the cockpit, Butler,' he said. He was back to his immaculate self again – all business. 'I'd like to make a private call...'

_This is madness, _thought Butler. _You do this and everything changes._

He squeezed his dark eyes shut. When he opened them again his heart was set.

'I'm going back for him,' he announced.

Artemis gave a small snort of laughter, one hand gripping the phone's cream handset, the other dialling calmly. 'No you are not.'

'I am.'

'Butler, despite the often casual form our relationship can take, you are still my employee. I am your master.'

'And you'll still be my master when I turn this plane around. Sir.'

Artemis clapped the handset back into its cradle. 'I order you to take us to Dublin,' he said, his voice icy cold and at its most authoritative.

Butler felt the weight of the little boy's command as if he was under the influence of a magic spell. It was an instinctive thing. He had been born and trained all his life to protect and obey this brilliant, fragile, spoilt little boy.

_And you are still protecting him. _

'I'm sorry, Artemis,' said Butler, not meeting his gaze.

The little boy's blue eyes widened. 'Take one more step towards that cockpit and you are dismissed,' he blurted, his voice raised half an octave.

The bodyguard paused.

'Do not test me,' continued his principal, jabbing a pale finger at the floor. 'Obey me now and we'll forget this bewildering lapse in judgement.'

The line had been drawn.

Butler hesitated – once – before crossing it.

'I'm sorry, Artemis.' His shoulders were squared, his mind made up. 'This is for your own good.'

He took two steps forward and Artemis Fowl the Second's face dropped. His world was crashing down around his ears. For the second time. It had taken seconds. Just like the news of his father's ship had barely two months ago.

He felt his eyes burn and cried out, tamping down any other feelings with a sudden burst of rage, '_Why?_'

His childish shriek nearly caused Butler to misstep on his way to the cockpit.

'Who is he, Butler?' demanded the boy. 'What is the connection?'

The bodyguard still couldn't look at him. 'Stay here. We'll be back in Fez within the hour. You can wait in the plane. You will be safe here.'

Artemis was not about to be ignored. He strode into the space between Butler and the cockpit door, glaring up into his face. '_Why?_ You've let plenty of other threats to my person suffer horrendous injuries without batting an eye but you _saved his life _back in Rathdown_._ And now you're prepared to storm a guarded compound singlehandedly to release him yet again. To break your contract with me, even.'

He took a deep breath.

'If this is the last thing you ever do for me Butler, or _Mister_ Butler, should I say, then give me an explanation.'

Butler stared at him. This little boy who was going through so much. Now his last stable ally was abandoning him 35,000 feet above the Earth.

'I'm going to have to restrain you,' said the bodyguard calmly. 'I can't risk you contacting someone to get the jet grounded.'

* * *

><p>'Finally!' cried Mulch as a sweaty and exhausted Holly heaved herself through the shuttle's hatch. 'Did you decide to do your Solstice shopping?'<p>

'Where is he?' panted Holly, slamming the hatch behind her with a clang.

Mulch jerked a thumb towards the back of the shuttle. 'In the bathroom. Might wanna give it a few minutes though, he's been in there a while.'

Holly made an indistinct grunting noise and charged off past Mulch. She wrenched her soiled head scarf off as she went, tossing it violently into a corner.

'Artemis?' she yelled. 'I want a word.'

She had travelled the uncomfortable and arduous journey back to the shuttle thinking through every possible reason why Artemis hadn't come for her. Considering this was the boy who had come for her even after she had lain dead with a sword pushed through her chest cavity, it was probably going to be an excellent excuse. Something that would be accepted by any jury or browbeaten schoolteacher the world over. Or it had better be, for his sake.

Death. That would have stopped him. But she couldn't think about that.

Capture. That could have stopped him. But who would want him?

Unconsciousness. That would have hindered him somewhat. But Holly had checked the souq and _Mesmerised_ a police officer into telling her whether he'd seen a sleeping white teenager anywhere about. He hadn't.

Distraction. That was a distinct possibility. Something important to _the plan _could have cropped up and he had rushed off to deal with it, trusting Holly to fend for herself. She'd found the cham pod still stuck to the wall of the souq. He would never have left useful fairy technology so recklessly behind like that unless he had had something else important to attend to – leaving it for her to pack up while he carried on like the inconsiderate, bratty rich boy he was.

Yep. She was going to go with that theory.

The door to the tiny facilities was shut tight, so she hammered on it with a fist. 'Artemis! I mean it. Open up. I want to go over the finer details of _not abandoning your mission partner to be picked up by the human locals _with you_._'

A sort of squawking noise replied to her.

Holly frowned. 'Artemis…?'

The door swung open.

The silky sifaka lemur was swinging from the shower rail, chittering frantically, its big eyes wide with mischief. Before Holly had a chance to react it sprung out from its perch, scampered over the elf's shoulder and sprinted into the main holding bay. Holly followed it.

'Where's Artemis?'

Mulch spun his chair so he was facing her. The lemur was stood happily on his arm, searching his scalp for ticks with long black fingers.

'The Mudboy?' he asked. 'He was with you, wasn't he? Did you lose him while shopping?'

Holly pressed the heel of her hand to her suddenly throbbing forehead. 'We didn't go shopping. I got knocked out. I woke up with… Has he called here?'

Holly's earpiece and mike had been smashed to bits in the tussle at the souq.

Mulch shook his shaggy head. 'Not a word to me since I was underground. He was telling me to be _patient. _Silly I'd stayed patient I'd've died and we wouldn't have Jay Jay here.'

The name distracted Holly. 'Jay Jay?' she repeated.

Mulch grinned. 'After my favourite LEPrecon Commander, of course.'

'Of course,' muttered Holly.

Death had rocketed to number one on her mental theory list.

_No. Don't think that way._

She knocked it down to third. What was left?

_Unconsciousness. Kidnap. _

Mulch clapped his hairy hands onto his knees, raising tiny mushroom clouds of filth. 'Well,' he said, 'he'd best get a move on wherever he is. Don't you two have some sort of deadline to meet?'

Holly checked the moonometer on the shuttle's dash. They had only hours left before her, Artemis and Jay Jay needed to be stood in his study in Fowl Manor. After that, there was next to no chance that No.1's magic would be able to pull them back into their time.

_No.1's magic. You total f'kup. _

[Gnommish for silly billy]

Holly flattened her palms over her heart, closed her eyes and concentrated.

Mulch cocked his head. 'Is now really the time for a kip?'

'_Shush!_'

She felt for him, for his magic, for that signature _Artemisness _she knew from their travels in the time tunnel. No.1's magic amplified her own and she felt her other five senses fall away as she searched...

Then agony flashed hot and unwelcome across the left side of her body. Then a chill. Suddenly she couldn't breathe. A hard pressure was holding her head still. She couldn't breathe. Something was stopping her from pulling back up. If she could just pull back– But the something was stopping her. She needed air. She couldn't hold on like this. She didn't have enough air left. She was going to have to breathe in. To breathe water. She couldn't. _She was going to die._

She opened her mouth and her scream erupted in a rush of bubbles—

'_Artemis!'_

Holly's eyes flew open. Her heart was pounding like a jack hammer beneath her fingertips. She staggered sideways and her hip collided with the shuttle's table. She gripped the lip for balance. 'Someone's got him,' blurted the elf, her whole body trembling like a leaf in a gale. 'Trying to… trying to hurt him.'

The convict's features had paled beneath the wiry growth of beard.

Holly shook her head hard, trying to clear it. But the ghosts of Artemis's cry refused to be budged.

'_D'arvit.'_

She stood back shakily. She couldn't stop trembling. Hot tears were suddenly blurring her vision.

Mulch scratched at his chin ponderously. Beside him, Jay Jay copied the gesture. As a general rule, Mulch didn't really do anything above and beyond the call of duty (or the call of whatever was paying him anyway), but he'd grown quite fond of the gangly Mudboy… And he_did_ still want that reward.

He mentally shrugged. Motivation was motivation.

'Do you know who'd want to hurt him?' he asked. 'Or whether, you know, he's actually just fine. And your psychic link thingy is on the fritz? There _were_ lots of great shopping places to the east of that market...'

Her arm jerked out in a south-westerly direction. 'He's that way,' she said, her voice still weak.

Mulch looked at where her finger was pointing. 'Hmm,' he said thoughtfully, staring at the patch of indistinct shuttle wall. 'That really narrows it down.'

* * *

><p><strong>Don't worry. Arty'll be out of the frying pan soon enough.<strong>

**Thoughts?**


	4. Into The Fire

**Part four! This chapter's reasonably miserable too as we go into Kronski's lair.**

**WARNING: Bad language. Some of it thinly disguised as Gnommish, some of it not.**

**The song is The Parting Glass (I love Ed Sheeran's cover personally).**

**And yes, Iluvcandyiluvcandy, dead on.**

* * *

><p><span>Chapter Four - Into the Fire<span>

'This is going to be impossible,' said Mulch. 'Just putting it out there.'

Holly would have scowled, if she weren't already doing so. She pushed the pair of Koboi Super-vise Goggles up onto her forehead and looked at the dwarf.

'Anything helpful to add?' she asked. 'Because that's exactly the type of comment I don't need right now.'

Mulch pondered this for a moment. He was dressed in a sun-proofed kaftan – the ugly love child of a burkini and a tent. It kept his delicate hide from roasting in the Saharan heat and even came with a matching hat. Most useful for those times when you needed to lie on the peak of a boiling sand dune to scout out a near-impenetrable desert compound from a distance.

Kronski's African fortress stuck out on like a shopping mall on the surface of the moon, its high concrete walls brushed smooth by a dozen punishing sand storms. Jeeps lurched to and from the main gates; their ridiculous camouflage cab covers made them look like the carapaces of beetles swarming about an anthill. Traffic had picked up in the last hour or so – the good doctor's dinner guests were arriving in force.

If only Artemis weren't on the menu.

'It's a shame you weren't the one the crazy Mud Man captured,' Mulch decided at last. 'That Mud Boy is one resourceful little grub – for a Mud Boy. He'd probably have blueprints, a disguise and a halfway decent plan by now. You'd be as good as rescued.'

Holly grinded her teeth.

She pushed herself up on her elbows and put a palm over her heart to do another quick check, her fifth in as many minutes. Her left side throbbed with a dull ache and she felt colder than was possible lying on this dune. Her breath caught briefly in her throat. Then her eyes snapped open.

_He's still alive, _she told herself. _Pretty bruised and depressed, but alive. _

'Tough _d'arvit_,' she snapped, mismatched eyes blazing. 'I came all this _d'arvitting _way to make sure he _d'arvitting_ made it back alive and like _d'arvit _am I going to _d'arvitting _give up now.'

Mulch picked something stringy and possibly alive from between his teeth. 'Stirring stuff.'

The elf beside him powered to her feet. Her head scarf whipped about her shoulders and her fists clenched into stones. She glared down at the compound as if she could crack open its walls by sheer willpower.

_I'm coming for you, Arty, _she promised him. _Hang tight._

* * *

><p>Artemis was singing quietly to himself. It was an old drinking song of his father's, popular with families and friends all over his homeland, most often sang at the end of an evening when folks were near to parting ways. It was a soft and sombre thing, and his guards, though ordered not to let their prisoner so much as squeak, were listening, glassy-eyed, to the words they couldn't understand but did all the same.<p>

The teenager tipped his head back against the dusty wall. 'But since it has so ordered been, A time to rise and a time to fall, Fill to me the parting glass, Good night and joy be with you all…'

One mammoth sentry sniffed and wiped a grubby hand across his cheek.

Then a slow, deliberate clapping started at the end of the basement.

'Bravo!'

Artemis cracked open his good eye.

The king of the Extinctionists was in his formal best – a tailored Bengal tiger with boots of seal and a belt of beaten turtle hide.

'A mighty fine tenor you got there, boy,' mocked the doctor. 'Damn shame to have to choke it off.'

He nodded to his guards who all scrambled back to their feet, rubbing moisture from their faces and trying to look mean. The nearest man, his dark gaze particularly bloodshot, gripped Artemis by his skinny bicep and hauled him up too.

'I'm afraid it is that time to fall, _my lad_,' said Kronski. 'The deadline's passed. And no-one's come for your sorry hide.'

'I'm ready,' said the teenager, more to himself than the lunatic before him.

'Wouldn't matter if you weren't, boy. You,' he spat in accented French at the squattest guard, his shirtless gut overflowing his belt. 'Gag him. I don't want his wailing to upset the cocktail reception.'

His eyes locked back to Artemis. 'You're a dead man walking, kid. The only reason your corpse ain't already buried 10 feet beneath an erg is because I need to send a message to your cousin back in Leprechaun land. One peep out of you between now and your death and I will have your lungs ripped out while you still breathe, sun-dried and turned into a waistcoat. That clear?'

Having just had a balled-up rag stuffed between his teeth Artemis couldn't give the scathing reply he wanted to (_Breathing and lung-ripping to be carried out simultaneously? Oh, please_), but Kronski took his sullen glare as a positive.

'Get a move on,' he ordered, striding towards the doors. 'I want to get back for those orang-utan hors d'oeuvres before Kirkenhazard nabs 'em all.'

* * *

><p>Holly had moved on from savage determination and was now at flippantly pissed off.<p>

_Could Artemis have been randomly held captive by the mild-mannered owner of a wombat sanctuary? No. He f'kin couldn't. _

[_f'kin _being a Gnommish word for 'really']

She closed her eyes and took a calming breath, clicking the bone in her neck to check the tank. She had a fair amount of magic left, but shielding without a suit was draining and she knew she'd need supplies to heal the battered Artemis. How she was going to get a non-magical-and-therefore-fully-visible Artemis back out again was beyond her…

_Cross that shuttle ramp when you come to it. _

She had mesmerised and shielded her way inside Kronski's compound with relative ease. There had been one hairy moment, when the tail of her head scarf had clipped a sentry's elbow as she'd clambered inside a guard tower and he'd fired a shot off which had missed her by millimetres, but he'd got a rollicking from his superior and Holly had slipped away wiping sweat from her brow. She had left her human clothes behind after that – she couldn't risk anything else whipping out and giving her away.

The Extinctionist base was a labyrinth but luckily the staff stairways were labelled at every floor. That and she'd heard two guards chattering about 'the boy in the basement'.

'He sings so sadly,' the one had said. 'It almost broke Amir's heart, he said. And Amir killed his own brother last Thursday.'

_He's singing? _Holly's panicked mind had thought. _What the d'arvit have they done to him? _

And she had quickened the pace, sinking down and down into the depths of the stairwell.

* * *

><p>Artemis's heart was beating a mile a minute.<p>

He had managed to calm himself sat back in his prison – singing had always been his _very very_ last resort when things were at their most fraught, a little trick shared with him by the Major, Butler's much-missed uncle – but now, being frog marched down a corridor to meet his maker, his throat had shrunk to the width of a reed.

_I'm going to die._

He tried to force his mind to think of other things but it was an impossible task.

How was it going to be done?Kronski still hadn't let that slip. If he wanted to 'send a message' then it wasn't going to be a simple shot to the head.

_Oh God._

Kronski was basically a Bond villain. Was he going to be dropped into a shark tank? Splattered on the inside of an industrial pressure tank? Sliced in half by a laser from crotch to scalp?

'_Do you expect me to talk?' _

'_No, Master Fowl, I expect you to die.'_

_I am so tired, _he thought dismally.

Artemis glanced up at his nearest guard. He was an ugly fellow, with pock-marked skin and greasy hair a few shades darker than the thick weave of his beard and moustache. The eyes beneath his heavy brows were startlingly green. They flickered sideways to meet Artemis's.

'Amir,' barked Kronski.

The guard looked away, grunted and swept open the doors his lanky quarry had been at risk of ploughing into.

The room on the other side was quite something to behold. Artemis, having grown up the billionaire ancestor of several aristocratic families of note, was not unused to banquet halls. But this…

It was a circus. There was the stage, the pit, the Moroccan tented canopies swooping low from a towering ceiling. There was even a scaffold for performers. And, of course, a gigantically long table fit for an Extinctionist party of seventy. A balcony ran along the full circumference of the hall, manned by guards in smart mock-military uniforms. Up high, a huge screen loomed over the whole caboodle and Artemis watched a projection of his own shocked face staring up at it.

_I look a disaster, _he thought, taking in the bloodied face and the ragged state of his shirt. _What would Mother think?_

A steel hand gripped his heart.

_Mother. _

Suddenly a spotlight was glaring in his eyes. He turned his face away, the guards around him bringing up their arms.

'Welcome to my show, boy,' announced Kronski, his face shining, striding towards the raised platform with his fat arms outstretched. 'And you–' The camera zoomed in for a close up of Artemis's squinting features– 'are gonna be the opening act.'

* * *

><p><em>If I can Mesmerise one or two guards, I can force them to get rid of the rest. <em>

It was hardly a plan of genius proportions, but due to emotional strain and exhaustion Holly's wits were on a budget. She was standing around the corner from a swarming rec room, fifteen chattering and laughing guards and a door away from where she hoped Artemis was being kept.

_You'd better be ready to run, Arty._

She prepared to shiver out of view. All she needed was for the tall guy picking his nose to turn her way. She'd nail him with the Mesmer and be done. His potato-like head looked over his shoulder.

_Nearly there… nearly there… _

And a hand clamped over her mouth, yanking her body backwards. She screamed against their palm, legs kicking, stubby nails clawing at the fingers barring her mouth. Then a steel forearm clamped about her windpipe, choking off her air supply.

'Stop struggling,' hissed a dangerous and all-too-familiar voice.

Holly internally rolled her eyes at the Fates.

'_Stop struggling._'

Her limbs fell limp_._

'Good. I'm going to let you go. If you scream, I will render you unconscious. Painfully.'

Her assaulter dropped his grip and Holly whipped around.

Butler was dressed in one of the camouflage uniforms of Kronski's upper security. It looked a little tight under the arms, but his chin had been peppered with the early beard growth favoured by most of the younger topside guards and his exposed skin turned suitably sun-worn.

Madam Ko would have been proud.

Holly, despite her frayed nerves, despite her state of undress, despite the voice growing steadily louder at the back of her mind telling her to drop where she stood and sleep, was suddenly struggling not to smile.

'Who the hell are you?' she demanded, drawing on her best amateur dramatics skills.

The Fowl bodyguard's mammoth torso advanced, steering her deeper into the shadows. 'Let's skip the introductions, shall we. I'm here to help you.'

Holly almost laughed. 'What? Why?'

'Let's just say I'm under orders from someone with your interests very close to heart. Your partner's ransom deadline will be up in twenty minutes –'

This snapped the smile off Holly's face. 'His _what_?'

The bodyguard looked at the elf in an uncannily accurate imitation of his master.

'_Tell me_,' ordered Holly, amusement firmly aside, her voice layered with the slightest hint of _Mesmer_. '_What ransom?_'

Butler blinked, his eyes losing focus. 'Your… your partner will be executed by Doctor Kronski in the next twenty minutes if we don't get there first.'

Holly swore. '_Why? How _has this happened?'

Butler continued in the same dull voice. 'Kronski thinks he helped my master steal the monkey. He's trying to use him as an exchange to get the animal back.'

'But little Art– Your master hasn't _got_ the lemur.'

'Which is why I'm here.'

There was a somewhat pregnant pause. The elf ended it with a sigh that was doubtless too loud considering their situation.

She nodded. 'And I'm glad you're here. And my… partner will be too.' She peered back around the corner into the break room. 'You said twenty minutes. We'd better move.'

* * *

><p>'Five separate flame jets, titanium floo, the ash vacuum at the base is 700 horse power…'<p>

_Death by ostentatious BBQ, _thought Artemis. _Terrific. _

Kronski glanced back at him, 'You'll only be in agony for a second and a half.'

A young guard piped up on the teenager's left. 'Doctor Kronski,' he said, in heavily accented English, 'it is ten minutes to the deadline.'

The Louisianan clapped his chubby palms together, his feathered cuffs ruffling.

A sentry took that as his cue to shove Artemis roughly towards the gas chamber's pit and the Fowl heir, caught unawares, tripped over the first step. His torso pitched forwards and he braced sore muscles for impact – when a strong arm clamped under his chest.

Kronski watched with piggy eyes from behind his tinted glasses as Amir righted his bedraggled captive. Artemis nodded warily in thanks.

'Sure you don't need a chair, boy?' asked the doctor mockingly, as the teenager took the last few shaky steps to the pit.

_F'queue_, thought Artemis viciously.

[a Gnommish word for 'I reject you and all you stand for on a deeply personal level']

Kronski grinned. 'You got something to say to me, boy?' He lazily gestured to Amir. 'Take the gag out.'

As soon as the cloth had cleared his lips the teenager broke into a painful coughing fit. There must have been some sort of oil still soaked into that rag. His mouth tasted of kitchen cleaner.

'You can't say I didn't give your accomplice fair time to come get you,' said the doctor, pacing slowly back so he stood between a pair of miked podiums. 'Four hours. A lemur for a man. How could he not do it?'

Artemis snorted at the irony and instantly regretted it.

Kronski winced. 'Is your face still a little sore there? No worries, boy. My pit will make sure nothing hurts you ever again.'

_The silver lining I've been looking for_.

'Any last words?'

Artemis's brain spat a jumble of images into his mind's eye. His mother's smiling face was there, and his father's. The twins, who he was only just beginning to know, grinned at him as one. Butler was there with Juliet. Mulch and Foaly. And Holly. Holly, hovering above him, her lips freshly parted from his.

What could he say?

_Je ne regrette rien?_

_Aurum Potestas Est?_

_So long and thanks for all the fish?_

Holly's mismatched eyes, a reflection of his own, seared the half-hearted jokes from his thoughts.

Artemis glared at Kronski, glad that his renovated body was a few inches taller than the insane American. 'None for your ears,' he said loudly.

The Extinctionist's grin faltered. He turned away in a sweep of fur and over-priced cologne. 'Lights!' he bellowed. 'Positions! _You_, get Fowl on the line…'

* * *

><p>'None for your ears.'<p>

Holly's blood was pounding to an unhealthy rhythm in her head. She was staring down at the boy –_ man – _in the fire pit with several emotions battling her for attention. Pride was there, certainly, and anger at the ones who had made him bleed. Fear, frustration, sadness, and a rush of something… something she would maybe have to talk to him about later. Possibly over supper.

Butler was standing across from her, holding his Kronski-issue rifle in an identical fashion to the dozen or so other guards ringing the balcony. His dark eyes too were transfixed on the hand-tied but straight-backed figure holding his head high as Kronski paraded about on his dazzling stage.

_When this is over,_ thought the bodyguard, his fist tightening on the gun's grip. _I am never blindly following one of his schemes again. If it so much as involves the risk of a paper cut, I am vetoing it._

He glanced up and saw the tell-tale shimmer that signalled the presence of the strange girl.

Magic, she'd said to him. She was doing it with _magic._ As if he was supposed to just take that in his stride.

_It's not the weirdest thing you've decided to believe today. _

He tapped his forefinger twice again the rifle's muzzle – their agreed signal. The sentry positioned opposite him blinked sluggishly, before reaching down and copying the gesture.

She was in position. Good.

'No-one answers, Doctor Kronski,' called a thickly accented voice from below.

The madman upped his pacing, back and forth, back and forth – a demented lion impatient for an overdue feed. 'Call again, then!'

Butler winced. The reason Artemis couldn't come to the phone right now was because he was locked in the Lear jet's luxury yet tiny toilet. Undignified, but Butler hoped to be back to him within the hour.

_And then that'll probably be it,_ he thought grimly. _He'll never speak to me again, never mind trust me, after this disaster of a day. _

'Still no-one answer, Doctor Kronski.'

The Extinctionist slammed a fat fist onto a podium, his face the colour of vintage Bordeaux.

Butler's finger tapped three times against the muzzle of his gun. The girl's shimmer trickled over the balcony railing, falling to the banquet room floor in a hazy stream.

'So not only does he leave you to die,' Kronski was ranting, 'but he don't even bother to pick up the phone for you.'

The haze drew closer to Kronski's side.

_Come on. Come on. _

She would do the hypnotising thing on the Extinctionist, get him to release his hostage, and he, Butler, would be down those stairs in a jiffy to whisk him out of here. And if that went tits up, he was high enough to start shooting.

She was three steps away.

Then the Louisianan sunk a hand into the folds of his jacket, pulling out a compact remote. 'I may as well kill you now!'

Butler's heart dropped into his stomach, the figure in the fire pit looked suddenly stricken, and a voice cracked out.

'_Non!_'

Every head in the room swivelled to stare at the squat, bearded man who had turned his Kalashnikov on the Extinctionist leader.

Kronski gaped at him. '_Amir?'_

Amir's green eyes had narrowed to crinkled slits. 'I cannot let you put him in fire,' he said fiercely in broken English.

The guard to his left, a man of at least 20 stone with a long ponytail and sweaty brow, sighed heavily. 'Amir, what are you doing?' he demanded. 'You know Safaa will castrate you if you lose this job.'

'The boy,' replied Amir, jabbing his gun at the teenager for emphasis. 'He reminds me of Abder.'

'But you _killed _Abder.'

Amir looked sheepish. 'I regret that now.'

* * *

><p>Artemis gaped openly at the little man with the green eyes, wondering if this all wasn't just a drug-induced hallucination. He was actually slumped unconscious over his desk at home, his brain succumbing to the dangerous amount of narcotics he had pumped into his system as he was wont to do when an important project demanded his attention and sleep became a low priority.<p>

_Wouldn't that be ideal. _

'I take boy,' Amir said, jabbing his gun back towards Kronski. 'Or I blow out brains of you.'

The Extinctionist's leader clicked his fingers. 'Guards!'

On the balcony above, thirteen men turned and jabbed the muzzles of their rifles down into the pit towards Amir, thirteen fingers tightening on their triggers—

'_Lollipops!' _shouted a high, shrill voice, in an accent almost no-one could place.

Artemis's heart almost shut down. 'No,' he blurted, the word punching from his between his lips.

The thirteen men on the balcony froze – _Mesmerised_, realised Artemis – and the hired thugs on the ground floor were equally incapacitated, staring slack jawed at Amir.

His green eyes were wide, panicked, his arms shaking – _D'arvit, _thought Artemis. Amir's gun was still pointed at Kronski. On the balcony, the fourteenth guard had pulled out a pistol that almost certainly wasn't standard issue.

_But that looks like–_

Amir's finger squeezed convulsively.

_Crack._

The bullet hit Kronski's chest approximately 0.56 seconds after the fourteenth guard's bullet drilled into Amir's arm. Kronski stumbled, his fat feet tripping over each other.

Then, for Artemis, the world shrunk to one person. Because there she was, a miracle in a standard-issue LEP one suit, having materialised from behind a Kronski now gargling blood.

She shouted his name.

New strength surged into his legs, and one blistered foot took a step forward.

A smile burst onto Holly's face and her lithe body lurched towards him.

_She came, _thought Artemis, relief spreading heat into his aching muscles. _Of course she came. _

The LEP captain was quick, one battered loafer already on the first step down to the pit.

But gravity was quicker. Kronski groaned and, inevitably, started to topple, the remote to the fire pit still clenched in his hand. The remote slammed into the polished floor of the podium, button down, weighed by the lifeless flesh of Kronski's palm.

Artemis saw, rather than heard, the scream rip from Holly's lips as the gas chambers' metal doors opened up beneath him.

Somewhere, another voice was yelling. Louder. Deeper.

'_ARTEMIS!'_

_Holly_, he thought. _Mother, I'm_―

Then the roar of the flames filled his ears.

* * *

><p>The next hour was something of a blur for Holly.<p>

Butler got them out.

There were gun shots, a lot of yelling. Blood. Amir's comrades had started firing in all directions, trying to find the sniper who had done for their boss – somehow hoping they'd be reimbursed for their efforts. Violence and chaos reigned. Holly had still been screaming at the fire pit's open doors when she had felt a steel forearm clasp about her stomach, wrenching her up and away.

She had fought him. Demanding to be allowed back. Because it couldn't be true. Artemis Fowl _couldn't _be dead.

Eventually, they were back in the desert. Butler had stood over her for a minute, letting her get it all out, pounding her fists into the sand, her eyes clenched, chest heaving, before dragging her up again by the elbow.

It took forty minutes to reach the shuttle.

When Holly had pushed the steel hatch open Jay Jay had scampered away in fright, wrapping himself about Mulch's considerable forehead and quivering nervously.

'So!' the dwarf had said, standing from the co-pilot's seat and stretching widely so Jay Jay had to cling on, chittering his annoyance. 'Could you have used my help after all? A dwarf's skills are near unlimited, you know. This pretty face ain't just for digging–'

'Give me the lemur.'

Her tone and expression made Mulch falter. He took Jay Jay down from about his head.

'What's the matter, officer? Why the look?'

The elf's eyes were dull and hard. 'Just give it to me.'

'Where's your Mud Boy?'

'He's not coming. So you'll have to take the shuttle as payment for services rendered.'

The dwarf's brow creased. He scratched at his beard, which was suddenly itching him something terrible.

'Jay Jay!' snapped Holly, clicking her fingers. 'Here.'

The lemur cocked his head.

'Go on, boy,' said Mulch quietly.

Holly collected him in her arms, stowing him like a field pack under her arm and turned back towards the hatch.

'Hey!' called the dwarf. 'Wait just a _d'arvitting_ minute! Don't you need to be in Ireland or something? I'll drop you off. Might as well finish this thing.'

'I've got alternative transportation,' replied Holly flatly.

And she was gone.

Boarding the Lear jet, Holly's sensitive elf ears had heard the singing before Butler did; hoarse and forlorn, too sad for the ten-year-old voice producing it. She took one look at the mammoth manservant before turning sharply away into the main cabin. With her out of sight, Butler took a deep breath and wrenched open the bathroom door. The song cut off. Tear-stained and still trussed as tightly as he had been left, Artemis Fowl II glared up at his ex-bodyguard with red eyes filled with loathing.

For an instant Butler could not breathe. His lungs had shrunk and shrivelled like newspaper tossed in a fire.

'I'm flying us back to Dublin,' he managed eventually, in as steady a voice as he could muster. 'We… have a guest we're taking back with us.'

'_Who?_' hissed Artemis.

'I… can't tell you.'

'Is he my father's?' demanded the little boy. 'Is he a Fowl bastard? My _half brother_?'

Butler had to close his eyes for a moment. He saw, for the hundredth time that hour, the shocked face of the hirstute teenager dropping into the pit. Heard the scream of the girl, felt the wave of heat wash over his face.

He slid the stiletto from his cuff with slightly trembling fingers and cut Artemis's thin limbs free. The ten-year-old immediately stormed out of the bathroom.

'Who are you?' he was yelling. 'You're on my plane, who the–?' His voice cut off.

Butler entered the main cabin to find girl and boy staring at each other.

Her lips quivered before thinning to a tight line. '_D'arvit_,' she whispered, speaking in some strange language Butler couldn't place.

'I demand to know who you are!'

'_D'arvit_.'

'Your name. Now.'

She looked at Butler, her mismatched eyes pleading.

The man tried to put a hand on the little boy's shoulder. 'Artemis–'

'No!' he shrieked. 'I will not be kept in the dark for one moment longer!'

'_Sleep,_' croaked the woman, still managing to sound like the voice of heaven despite the rasp. '_Sleep._'

The boy had stumbled back, bumping against Butler's legs. 'No!' he yelled again, the sound warped by a sudden yawn. 'No. I… refuse…'

When he finally slumped backwards, Butler was there to catch him.

'I'm sorry,' said Holly, her voice hitching. 'I just– I just–'

'Probably for the best,' said the manservant quietly. He pulled the ten-year-old up into his arms before laying the little boy's body to rest on a nearby chair.

* * *

><p>Smacking like a sack of shit into a metal table following an eight foot drop was the last straw for Artemis the elder's battered body. He stayed conscious long enough to feel steel wire brand cold lines into his ankles, his forehead, his arms, and hear the hiss of some undoubtedly insidious gas being released into his surroundings, before his eyes rolled back and he was dead to the world.<p>

A moment later a pair of pneumatic doors opened and Opal Koboi clacked into the room in koala-fur boots, a minion tight on her three-inch heels.

'That,' she said astutely, 'is not a lemur.'

Mervall's dark eyes widened with panic. 'No. Er. It's not, your most supersplendicious.'

'It's a Mud Boy. Man. Thing.'

'Er…'

Opal let out a piercing shriek of frustration and Mervall backed swiftly away. Having seen his brother tossed into an animal pen not five hours previously for failing to say he liked the koala boots, Mervall had no wish to join him. He had a three-day weekend coming up and it would put a bit of a dent in his plans.

'The Mud Man had one job!' screamed his mistress, a vein bulging beneath the fair skin of her temple and a small amount of steam rising from her parting. 'I am one brain away from _ultimate power _and it sends me _this! _This useless, fleshy, sack of–'

Opal's insult died in her throat. Because scarlet sparks were dancing over a nasty-looking cut on the left side of the Mud Man's face.

_Magic. Human. _

Opal gasped. 'What…?'

Because, with Artemis unconscious, the negligible amount of magic he had been granted back in his study eight years in the future was free to roam. No.1's signature sparks shot straight to his head, wiping away the bruise to his forehead and reducing the swelling about his eye. His breath ceased to rasp in his throat and instead passed smoothly, unhindered past his lips.

Opal looked at him like a hyena would look at a lion carcass. Saliva actually started to pool in the pit of her dark mouth. She snapped the heels of her hands onto his temples hard enough to bruise and _pulled_ with her magic_. _

_Dear Frond. _

She had never probed a cranium like it. It was a fortress of memory, with high-ceilinged eyries of art, music, paintings and deep basements of blueprints and wickedly sharp tools. Faces and fragrances flashed through her mind's eye along corridors of freezing stone, scribbled formulas and tea. Her shoulders shuddered as she forced the Mud Man's dreaming intellect to take her to the _magic. _She pushed open a weightless, highly polished door.

_An LEP officer unconscious in a basement, an Arctic snow drift, a corridor in Koboi lab. _

Opal's brow twitched in surprise. _They were her labs, hers! _

But this was impossible. She pulled harder, forcing his mind to expand its impression, to show her titanium corridors, plasma pipes, a pulsing control room – It looked exactly like the factory she was planning to build in Haven's Upper East Side. But construction wasn't to begin for another three months, she hadn't even handed the final plans to the architects yet…

_Betrayal. Violence. The same LEP elf knocking her unconscious._

She fastforwarded through months of memory in just a few seconds, ripping through the drawers of his mind, the heat of the transaction singing a few clumps of loose black hair.

_Revenge. The Eleven Wonders. The sickly sweet taste of chocolate truffles as her own face shouted from a shuttle comm screen... _

So this _boy _was a time traveller. And he knew her. And she would kill Commander Root of the LEP. But she would fail to kill Foaly, to kill an LEP elf, to kill… this… this…

She snapped back her hands and Artemis's cheek fell back against the metal with a dull thump. Steam puffed gently from his left ear.

Rage was flooding her veins. This _human_, this _child _would…

Mervall piped up tentatively. 'Mistress?'

Sparks crackled about her fingertips. 'Shut up!'

She had to think. It was clear to her now, even if it wasn't to the boy yet, that she was the root of his current problem. The lemur. Spelltrophy…

She turned back to the table, fighting the dizziness brought on by the whirlwind tour of the human's frankly intimidating mind.

'I could burn him right here. Avenge my future self,' she whispered. 'But the paradox…'

The human twitched and muttered something in a base Mud Man language. Opal narrowed her eyes.

_Genius._

'Mervall,' she purred, turning slowly to face him, her dark pupils unfocused. 'Do we still have any of those samples Haven sent?'

The pixie minion was at her elbow in an instant. 'I believe so, mistress most magnificent.'

'Wonderful.' Opal bent closer to the human, pushing back a matted hank of dark hair that had been near welded to his forehead with sweat. 'And people say I don't have a sense of humour…'

* * *

><p><strong>Kronski needed to die. I'm grateful to Fanfiction for providing a platform so I could finally make that happen.<strong>

**Would love to hear your thoughts! Where do you think this is going to go next? (Clue: I'm between two endings****)**


	5. Long Way to Tipperary

**This one's for Lli. It ain't original, but it's something!**

**Also, a big thanks for everyone who has reviewed and favourited so far. You're why this has been finally updated. **

**That, and I'm not done with this Fandom quite yet.**

* * *

><p>Holly landed heavily on the Aubusson rug of Artemis's study. For a moment she didn't move a muscle; she lay on the antique weave, her fists loose, her legs weak and limp as lengths of string. Then Jay Jay shot, squealing, out of the time stream behind her, his forepaws punching into her muscled back.<p>

'Holly? Holly!'

A pair of four-fingered hands landed on her shoulders and turned her over with a surprising strength. No.1's yellow eyes were slits of concern.

'I can't sense him, Holly,' he whispered urgently. 'Our link just cut off. Where is he?'

Holly clenched her eyes shut before she pushed herself to her feet. 'He's not coming.'

'_He's stuck in the year 2000?_' whinnied Foaly from a nearby monitor. 'Good Frond. The Venga Boys were enough of a trial the first time around.'

No.1 grabbed Holly's wrist. 'Holly?'

She broke away from him and clicked her fingers at Jay Jay. 'Here boy. Come.' She turned to look at Foaly's image. 'Where's the injection pack? What do I need to do?'

The centaur's thick brow furrowed. 'Where is he, Holly? Where's Artemis?'

'Angeline is going to die if I don't get this cure into her soon _so tell me where the pack is._'

'It's still in her room. Bedside table.'

'Thank you.'

She scooped Jay Jay up under her arm and marched through the office door. No.1 stared after her, bottom lip trembling, his stubby tail drooping to the carpet.

Rounding the corner of the corridor to the Fowl parents' room the cold, accusing stares of a dozen Fowl ancestors glared down at her, the slap of her bare feet muffled by deep scarlet runners. She hitched Jay Jay up a little higher, squeezing him like a child would a teddy bear. On reaching the door she stretched out a hand for the knob. Jay Jay's round and inquisitive face was reflected in the brass.

One breath, two, rattled past her lips, and then she twisted.

The curtains were half drawn and in the shaft of midday sun beaming into the room stood a tall figure with their back to the door. Holly's eyes shot to the bed where Angeline Fowl still lay. Her breathing was calm now, spots of colour high in her cheeks – she was well again, a healthy woman napping away the afternoon heat. Holly gripped the doorknob tighter. The mysterious figure had not turned to her, but judging by his height and the silver in his hair he could only be Artemis Senior, and he must not see—

'Holly?'

The air was crushed from her lungs.

'Holly? Is that you?'

He looked at her with mismatched eyes.

She was faintly aware of Jay Jay pulling from her limp grip and scampering away.

Holly watched the man stroking the little tuft of hair above the lemur's brow with long, pale fingers. Pianist's fingers. His face was young despite the grey hair and the creases at the edges of his eyes. His shoulders were broad but his waist thin, the inverted triangle of a dedicated athlete, a swimmer perhaps. He was dressed casually yet handsomely in a white shirt and slacks, his jacket sleeves rolled up to the elbow to reveal lean, strong forearms.

Finally, Holly regained her voice. 'This can't be.'

'Opal is restrained downstairs,' said the man, as if she hadn't spoken, 'as is Doctor Schalke. Not that you'll know who he is…'

'You went into the flames.'

'My plan proceeded perfectly, as it should have. It has been eight years in the making after all.'

'I saw you fall.'

Artemis Fowl the Second allowed the creature to drop from his arms. 'You will have to contact Recon to perform a full Mind Wipe and send past Opal back to where she belongs.'

Holly was moving, her eyes wide, her footsteps slightly staggered. The man watched her approach.

'You,' she insisted, 'died.'

'I took the long way home.'

She reached up and grasped the front of his shirt, yanking him down. He fell obligingly to his knees.

A slight smirk curled at the edges of his mouth. 'Look into my eyes and tell me that I'm dead.'

Holly looked. And, like so many years before, she saw the truth.

He reached slowly into an inner pocket and pulled out a familiar, battered Omnitool. 'I believe this belongs to you,' he said quietly.

Holly turned her long-lost present on its end to look at the inscription.

_To Holly, my Soldier Poppy. All my love, Mum_

She felt tears begin to prick in her eyes and tightened her grip on the metal. Artemis laid a hand, larger than she was used to, on her shoulder.

'I'm sorry I'm late.'

She made a sound, half laugh, half sob, before launching herself at his neck. The Omnitool dropped to the thick carpeting as she held him close. His strong arms wrapped around her back and Artemis Fowl the Second was home at last.

* * *

><p><span>Chapter Five – A long way to Tipperary<span>

Artemis Fowl the Second's eyes flashed open, one bare foot shooting out to strike against metal bars.

_What use is it?_ He raged. _Indulging in these fantasies?_

He had woken some time earlier, his knees crouched, his neck bent at an untenable angle, with the worst headache of his life. Jerking upright, he had whacked his sore head against a steel roof. Striking out, he had bruised his knuckles against steel walls. It had been pitch black inside his cage. Screeches and squawks had assaulted his ear drums and for one mad moment he had thought he was back in Rathdown Park.

But the musty smell of animal was overlaid by a clinical hospital smell Artemis associated with his mother's retreat from sanity. It was a struggle to turn without his knees and elbows clanging against smooth metal. His fingers had met hard bars and something cold and wet had sloshed against his front.

And as time crept forward there had been no break in the cacophony of animal noise. He had tried counting the voices and reached 87 separate calls.

But there was one thing not unwelcome about his new circumstance; most of his injuries sustained in Kronski's basement had either completely healed or felt weeks old. So, unhindered, his vision had adjusted and the shadowy outlines of instruments, slabs, lamps, and IV poles had become clearer. Fear fluttered in his chest.

Then he had caught sight of the box of half-eaten truffles perched on the edge of a work surface. And the memory of Opal Koboi slithering about his mind had returned with the force of a ten-tonne truck.

'She knows everything,' he said hoarsely, his voice inaudible above the inhuman clamour. 'She knows entirely about my hand in her future downfall.'

_And so she's decided to leave you to starve to death―_

Artemis's foot shot out against the bars again. The crook of his left arm was stinging as if someone had punched it. The muscles in his back were screaming for room to straighten. Unwashed and bloody, his clothes were soiled rags he would have tossed aside in an instant. If only he had room to move—

His hands clanged against the bars.

'_Help!' _he shouted, his calm breaking, his reason momentarily abandoning him. '_Help me!' _

The chitters and wailing of the animals became, if possible, even louder.

'_HELP!'_

* * *

><p>Judging by the patterns of the land 30,000 feet below, Holly knew they were nearing their destination. Her forehead was pressed up against the plexi-glass window of the captain side of the Lear jet, the juddering of the fuselage not doing much to shake free any thoughts of Morocco.<p>

Behind her she heard a faint moan, then a gasp.

'Butler?'

The voice was a child's just woken from an unsettling dream. Raven-haired and bleary-eyed, Artemis Junior screwed a knuckled into his right eye socket. His tie was off, along with his shoes. With his shirt untucked and his jacket discarded he was a young schoolboy again, not a criminal.

'Butler left you dinner,' said Holly flatly to the window. 'It's over there.'

The ten-year-old's eyes travelled to the silver cloche sitting on the table in the dining area.

There was a pause, a rustle of clothing. Then: 'Thank you.' He slid out of the white leather seat and padded over to inspect his victuals. He looked down at his warped reflection in the cloche's polished dome, his expression neutral. 'Was he a friend to you? A good friend?'

The elf briefly closed her eyes. 'I'm not starting this conversation with you again.'

Plucking cutlery from its niche in the table, Artemis sniffed and seated himself. Holly listened to the neat clinks of his knife and fork against porcelain, the soft thud as he occasionally replaced his water glass on the table cloth. Eventually, she couldn't stand it.

He had the bread basket held out in his hand before she had even reached the table. She snatched it from his grasp.

'How long have you been associated with Butler?' he asked casually, as she used her teeth to tear off a chunk from a poppy seed roll. Grief had deadened her appetite, but if she were to fulfil Artemis's final wish she would need her strength.

'A while,' she managed around her mouthful.

'It can't be much longer than I have. You're what? In your mid to late teens?'

Holly ripped a cluster of grapes from the bunch and dumped them on her plate. 'I'm older than I look.'

'Earlier, when you hypnotised me... That was a spell, wasn't it?'

The elf forced herself to look at him; the pasty skin, the piercing eyes beneath thick, quizzical eyebrows, burnt the oxygen from her lungs.

'Magic? Really?' She was trying to scoff but the words emerged far too strained, tangled in her throat.

Those blue eyes narrowed. A door opened behind Artemis and out strode Butler. 'We'll be landing in thirty minutes,' said the bodyguard gruffly.

Holly picked up her plate and retreated back to her window. She stared determinedly out at the clouds again, rubbing the blade of her hand impatiently across her cheeks.

'_Was_ he a member of my family?' asked the ten-year-old sharply from behind her.

'A distant relative,' replied Holly, her throat closing again. 'Very distant.'

* * *

><p>Teenage Artemis had managed to lie down, his arms wrapped around his head to block out some of the squawks, cries, keens and howls. His breathing was amplified inside his skull. Thirty minutes previously he had had the idea of using the magic No.1 had blessed him with to somehow melt and bend back the bars. Only to find all traces of that magic had been sucked from him, presumably by Opal or through the healing of his injuries while he was unconscious and unable to control it.<p>

'Who's your momma?' squawked a parrot from a cage above. 'Who's your momma?'

'Angeline,' replied Artemis, his hoarse rasp drowned out by a long, agonised wail from somewhere to his left. 'Angeline.'

'It's good but it's not right.'

The teenager started so violently he nearly knocked himself out against the rear of the cage.

'Mulch?' he croaked, twisting frantically to grip the bars. 'Mulch?'

The teenager could make out the white glow of the dwarf's colossal grin through the gloom. 'Well either it's me or you've completely snapped.'

'Which would be plausible,' whispered Artemis.

Then his body lurched forward as the front of his cage dropped open, the bars ripping from his fingers. Weak and contorted as he was there was nothing to stop Artemis toppling out of his prison onto the floor. And so he did.

'You've got to be the least coordinated Mud Man I've ever met,' observed Mulch. 'Not that I've met a terrific amount of you, but still.'

Artemis pawed at the dwarf's sleeve in an attempt to pull himself back to his feet. 'How… How are you here?'

Mulch grabbed his elbow and helped his ascent. 'Well there's this giant flame pit thing just over our heads. It's got a false bottom, would you believe it?'

Still dazed and not entirely sure he wasn't lost in another fantasy, the teenager stared about Opal's lab. 'Is Holly here? Where is she? The shuttle?'

Mulch had walked away and was helping himself to a handful of brown pellets affixed to the cage of a chittering simian. 'Nah, she took off a while ago. Took the lemur with her, said she'd got another ride back to Ireland.' The dwarf frowned. 'She seemed to think you weren't coming back, y'know. I just thought you'd had a tiff and done a bunk – she gave me the shuttle. If I hadn't found that note in the salad drawer I would be half a continent away by now as well.'

'She thinks I've been murdered.'

Mulch's bushy eyebrows cranked up to merge with his hairline. 'Ah. That would explain things.'

The floor was swaying beneath Artemis's feet like the deck of a ship. He sat down heavily in a nearby swivel chair built for a being half his size. Splaying the pads of his fingertips on his temples Artemis closed his eyes. It was a struggle, sleep deprived and under nourished as he was, but soon options and possibilities were spread about his mental canvas like forensic maps. One course of action became clear. 'Can you get us–' He heaved a dry, rasping cough– 'to Dublin in the next two hours?'

The dwarf's smile grew by a few extra molars.

* * *

><p>The smell of Fowl Manor, of old paint, cloves, leather, grass cuttings and tea leaves, assaulted Holly's nose. She gasped, taken by surprise, her hands leaping to her face. In the plane she had tried, tentatively, reaching out to Artemis's side of the magical link. She had met with devastating emptiness. For a moment she had nearly panicked and fallen into it.<p>

_But you said you would look after Angeline. _

And she'd be damned if she couldn't do at least that much for Artemis. What had turned out to be his dying wish.

_Freeze it. Think about him later. When you're back. When you're alone._

'If you're going to be ill I would prefer you do it in a bathroom.'

Holly let her hand drop, meeting the ten-year-old's cool gaze. 'Just get me to the study.'

* * *

><p>'Hey!' barked Mulch. 'Don't you be going to sleep Mud Man!'<p>

Artemis was laid out on the floor of the shuttle between the passenger seats, his eyes half-lidded, listening to the sluggish pump and clank of machinery under the floor. His left arm was hurting more than ever now, and a red lump had risen in the crook. Presumably some negative reaction to a sedative injection.

The events of the past few days were catching up with him and despite his healings he felt worse even than in Kronski's storage basement. His breathing and his heartbeat were strangely loud in his ears. His skin throbbed in time. A thin sheen of sweat had resisted the lukewarm waters of the shower he had taken once Mulch had helped him stagger aboard the ship. It was slowly discolouring the 'I heart Vienna' shirt he had pulled back over his head.

'_Oi!_' bellowed Mulch.

'Yes! Alright!' croaked Artemis, heaving himself upright. He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead to counteract the dizziness.

The dwarf was right of course. The time for respite was long over. Opal was threatening his family, and he needed to concoct the mother of all plans. Of course, after seeing her lab, he now knew the pixie's objective and thus the catalyst for this entire nightmare – the lemur, it was always the lemur. His mother would never contract Spelltrophy (something of a relief) but Opal's facade would become the leverage needed to force Artemis back in time to fetch it. That creature was the last thing she needed to acquire power over time itself. The only living being of its—

Then a new thought, a new terror, hit Artemis so hard it caused him to crash to his knees with the next shunt of the shuttle. The ambient noises inside the hull were whited out by one loud, piercing tone.

_Not the lemur._

'We'll be there in twenty,' said the dwarf, unperturbed by the terrified rictus now twisting the teenager's features. 'Might be a bumpy landing so I'd find a way to strap your bony arse down.'

* * *

><p>'Here,' said Holly. 'It's right in this spot.'<p>

'Do you need anything?' asked Butler.

He was standing in the doorway to Artemis's inherited study, his bulk filling the entire frame. His former charge was glowering beneath one massive palm, his face half-concealed by shadow. The LEP captain had moved to the centre of the rug, her thin limbs trembling visibly from the pressure of keeping the time link.

'Just Jay Jay.'

The lemur, perhaps having recognised his new name, swivelled his fluffy head towards her and bounded gracefully into her outstretched arms. Holly squeezed him to her chest.

There was a moment's pause.

'Well?' snapped the ten-year-old. 'Have you forgotten the magic words or something?' Artemis gave a completely mirthless laugh and attempted to jerk his shoulder from his former bodyguard's grip. Butler's brow creased briefly.

Holly closed her eyes. The thread of magic attaching her to No1 was as thin as spider's silk.

The boy glared at her. '_Well?_'

Jay Jay dropped back to the floor.

The breath was squeezed from the little boy's body partly due to his own shocked gasp but mostly because the strange woman had wrapped him in her arms. She was pressing her face hard into his bony shoulder.

'I'm so sorry,' she was whispering, in a language Artemis didn't recognise. 'I'm so sorry.'

The little boy knew he should be wrenching himself away but something kept him planted. Butler's hand resting on his other shoulder had suddenly tightened. The affection was clear. He knew instinctively in that moment that the two people sandwiching him loved him very much. But…

'Why…?'

Tears had leaked from the corner of the strange woman's mismatched, almond-shaped eyes. 'You are a good person,' she said hoarsely in English. 'Remember that.'

Butler's fingers were bunching the material at his shoulder, holding him almost painfully tight. The woman's eyes flicked upwards and Artemis knew they were sharing something silently. Then his hand jerked up to touch the skin below his left eye. 'Mine,' blurted the boy, almost involuntarily.

Her gaze dropped. 'Jay Jay,' she croaked, ushering the little creature back up into her arms.

The boy's hand dropped to his chest. 'Me,' he said, his tone surer this time.

A strange wind was starting to stir, originating from the small woman herself. It plucked at Artemis's uncombed hair and flapped at the bodyguard's jacket.

He rounded on his former bodyguard. 'The one person you would protect above all others!' yelled the ten-year-old above the building noise.

There was a deafening crack, like a single bolt of lightning had struck the rug, and a swirling purple portal appeared before Artemis Senior's old desk.

'There'll be people back to Mind Wipe you!' bellowed the woman over the roar. 'Don't fight them!'

Holly held Jay Jay close as she melted back into the arms of the time stream. The last thing to go was her face, those strange eyes still transfixed on the little boy whose tiny mouth had dropped open.

'Be well,' she said, taking a last hungry look at the best friend she would never see again, and was gone.

* * *

><p>'Farewell, Mud Boy!' shouted Mulch, watching the gangly teenager limp off up the manicured lawn towards the manor's fortified front doors. He caught the eye of the lone peacock that was staring beadily his way from beside an ornate fountain. 'What you looking at?' he sniffed, before slamming the shuttle door closed on the weak Irish sunshine.<p>

'Just me, myself and I, dear Mulchy,' he said to himself, elbowing the button which would seal the cabin ready for flight and plodding off down the shuttle's gangway. 'No more desert, no more humans, no more bolshy Recon cops.'

Mulch had accepted that the shuttle would be the only payment he'd be getting for the last few days' worth of crazy. This was because when he'd asked about the bucket of gold the Mud Boy had given him a look Mulch translated to mean 'What do you expect me to do? Pull it out of my arse?' The human had been in a foul mood (no pun intended) for the entire journey – when he wasn't groaning on the floor or bracing himself against walls to stop his head from spinning he was snapping at Mulch to push the shuttle harder or muttering vociferously under his breath. The boy needed a bed, a hospital bed.

_But it's no use fretting about him anymore, _he told himself firmly, faintly disgusted that he _was _worrying about anyone besides himself. _Onwards and downwards. _

There was some business he could complete beneath the Appalachian Mountains with a sprite neck-deep in the illegal hamster smuggling trade now he had proper transport at his disposal. Well. Once he'd taken on a little fuel. Mulch was 99 per cent sure he had cleaned out every morsel of anything even slightly resembling food from the inside of the stolen shuttle but it had never hurt him to double check.

And so it was there, at the bottom of the last locker, in pursuit of the faint smell of an LEP issue energy bar, that Mulch finally found and tripped the Mind Wipe Artemis had illegally broken open and modified from a Recon kit bag only twenty minutes before. The last three days were bleached from the dwarf's memory in a blast of white light and when he woke up moments later, blinking stars from his vision, trying to remember the surely entertaining events of the binge which had led him to pass out in an LEP shuttle ploughed into the grounds of a Mud Man's stately home, he decided to not look a gift horse in the mouth and set off, cackling, for West Virginia.

* * *

><p>The electric storm of magic and time in the Fowl office finally burnt out. It had taken the strange woman and the lemur with it leaving ten-year-old Artemis staring at the spot from which they had both had vanished, a tiny part of his brain registering that his father's desk had been left unharmed despite the shards of angry purple sorcery lashing at it moments before.<p>

'He was me,' said the boy weakly. 'The man Kronski took hostage. He was from… from my future?'

Butler heard the question in his former master's voice but couldn't answer it. Even after all the events of the last 72 hours. In his mind's eye he saw the flash of bright red boxers as the dark haired man had fled from his tranquilizer gun.

Then Artemis's gaze was on him, hard and keen. 'You told me he _died._'

'He did.'

'You told me he fell into a _fire pit_, that you and the girl attempted a rescue but it _didn't work_.'

'He did. It didn't.'

The little boy jerked backwards, bumping into the desk. Butler watched as he grappled with the controls of the state-of-the-art desk top, mouse clicking, fingers sprinting across the keyboard. It didn't take him long to recover and download the video conversation he had recorded in the skies over Africa.

The ten-year-old watched the whole fateful disaster to the end, brow furrowed as if the events on screen were a puzzle he still had a hope of solving. He flinched at his final words – 'Do as you wish!' – and again at the fatal click of the laptop lid as he had shut down Kronski's offer of a hostage exchange.

Silence fell then. Even the birds outside the window had stopped singing. The ten-year-old's balled fists slowly opened atop the desk. He opened his mouth as if to say something but no sound came out. The silence dragged on.

To be broken by the thundering of footsteps in the corridor.

'Artemis, under the desk,' ordered Butler, pulling his Sig Sauer smoothly from its holster.

There was a crash, someone knocking over an end table as they ran, then desperate shouting. 'Holly! _Holly!_'

Little Artemis stayed where he was as Butler backed in front of him, his firearm raised, aimed at average head height towards the doorway – in which appeared a ghost.

'Where–?' blurted the figure, their hands braced against the jam, dark hair swinging into their face. They pushed it impatiently aside. 'Where is she?'

Artemis the younger was the first to recover his voice. 'If… If by Holly you mean the petite woman with dichromatic eyes I'm afraid you've just missed her.'

'Missed?' gasped the figure. '_Missed_ her?'

For the first time in his life Butler dropped his gun. He clapped a hand behind him to the desk. The world seemed to be pulling out from under his feet like a cheap magician's trick.

'Artemis Fowl the Second, I presume?' he heard his ex-master say, with an unmistakable tremble.

The ghost didn't answer. He was staring at a point somewhere through the far window, mouth open, his breath coming in small, staccato gasps. 'You mean the time stream? She's already–?'

Then his breath was punched from him as a small figure crashed into his midriff, hugging him hard. Artemis the elder looked down and for one mad moment believed it to be his little brother Myles clamped around his waist. He managed to raise his hands in shock before it was Butler's turn to make a strangled sort of huff and crash into the two of them, crushing the remaining air from his lungs.

They stood there for a prolonged moment before the little Artemis was forced to tap frantically on Butler's side. The seven-foot man stood back swiftly and the elder Fowl took in a gulp of air.

'Apologies,' said the ten-year-old formally, standing back at a polite distance. 'I am, _we _are, pleased to see you. All evidence recently pointed to your being–'

Artemis cut through the chatter with a weak wave of his arm. 'How long ago did she leave?'

The boy, as no other boy could be, was immediately all business again. 'Ten minutes at the outset.'

Blood throbbed at the tips of Artemis fingers and Butler's hand was suddenly at his elbow. The teen's head turned to look at him but his vision swam. He was guided into a chair.

'I need to plan,' muttered the Fowl heir, gripping the arm rests hard, resisting the darkness eating at the edges of his vision. 'I need to think.'

'You need a bed,' said Butler softly. He pressed a massive palm to the young man's febrile forehead.

The little Artemis snapped his fingers impatiently. 'Is there not a way to simply reopen the time stream?'

'You need magic for that.'

'Don't you have magic?'

'Not currently.'

'Then couldn't you procure some?'

A wave of irritation momentarily cut through the teenager's exhaustion. 'I'm afraid I've left my spare bag of pixie dust in my other–' The words died in his throat.

'_Yes?_' persisted the little boy. 'So you could–'

One grimy palm smothered his words.

Butler was forced to step aside as the bedraggled young man rose from his seat, mismatched eyes unfocused. He paced towards the window with both hands outstretched, index fingers twitching like dowsing rods.

'Did he just shush me?' hissed the ten-year-old, wiping his lips on his sleeve.

Butler was watching his aged charge like a panther poised to spring. 'Shush.' The bodyguard's heart was pumping harder than it ever had in his chest. He was faintly surprised that it _was_ still pumping what with all the strain that had been put on it today.

The fourteen-year-old Artemis turned sharply on his heel. He pointed a long finger straight at Butler. 'Do we have a supply of fire suits?'

The bodyguard stood to attention. 'In the second floor locker.'

A lock of jet black hair tipped into the young man's stern face. 'Three of them?'

* * *

><p>Holly landed heavily on the Aubusson rug of Artemis's study. For a moment she didn't move a muscle; she lay on the antique weave, her fists loose, her legs weak and limp as lengths of string.<p>

_He should be there, _she thought, gazing at the empty space on the carpet beside her. _He should be exchanging witticisms with Foaly. No.1 should be asking him about Quantum Zombies. _

Then Jay Jay shot, squealing, out of the time stream behind her, his forepaws punching into her muscled back. Holly grunted and raised her head. The laptop screen which had framed the centaur's hirsute face was dark and lifeless. She looked around.

'No.1?'

The office was empty.

'Jay Jay,' she murmured, pushing to her feet. 'Here boy.'

The lemur, which had climbed on top of a book shelf stacked with century-old legal tomes, cocked its head and pawed at the air.

A cold prickle raised the hairs on Holly's arms. '_D'arvit_,' she muttered.

She glanced towards the corner where her discarded LEP suit should still lay. It had vanished. A grandfather clock somewhere in the depths of the manor started to toll. Once. Twice. Three times. Holly's heart dropped.

'Jay Jay!' she snapped.

Bundling the creature into her arms she stormed through the office door. She sprinted down the corridor as the clock still tolled. Artemis's ancestors glared at her from the walls, bewigged men atop spindle-legged horses, glassy-eyed women brandishing fans. Holly felt like a fist had taken hold of her organs.

Angeline's door was metres away. She grasped the knob and wrenched it open.

A figure was sitting in the Queen Anne chair beside the shuttered window, his silver hair slicked back, one manicured hand resting on the butt of a presumably loaded pistol.

'_Guten arbend_,' said the stranger formally, his glasses glinting in the light from a nearby lamp. He got up stiffly and raised the gun.

_What the―?_

Holly reared back, slamming the door shut after her. Jay Jay was panicking, squirming wildly to escape her grip.

'No! Jay Jay!'

She twisted awkwardly, trying to keep him in her arms, but ended up falling heavily to the carpet – just as a bullet broke the wood of the bedroom door behind her, shooting across the corridor and punching straight through the chest of an aloof-looking greyhound in oils.

Ignoring the burns on her elbows and knees she decided the lemur had the right idea of it and scrambled after him. Two more bullets chased after her retreating back, splintering the frames of two more pictures.

_What the d'arvit is happening? _She thought frantically.

She needed to get to her LEP suit, to her own gun and supplies. What was this mad Mud Man doing shooting up Fowl Manor? Was Angeline Fowl harmed? She hadn't seen the bed properly. Was it too late, lemur or not? _Where the d'arvit were No.1 and Foaly?_

All these thoughts were swiftly cut short.

The gigantic man standing in the centre of the hallway, his shaven head beaded with sweat, his bespoke Armani suit tailored well enough to satisfy even Artemis's standards of dress, was trembling silently as he levelled the Beretta at Holly's chest.

'You're late, Holly Short,' said Butler.

* * *

><p><strong>When you can't decide between endings, do both! How many of you did I get with that fake beginning? Anyone? <strong>

**As always, feedback is much appreciated. **


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